Additional information
by Öznur Şahin (Editor), Youssef Harvey (Editor), Hamza Yormaz (Photographer)
This work presents an exhaustive list of flagrant human rights violations to the degree of social genocide, perpetrated after the coup attempt of 15 July 2016. The political Islamist and ultra- nationalist power bloc led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has built an iron-fisted regime with the State of Emergency (OHAL) launched on July 21, 2016 and the consecutive, unsupervised statutory decrees (KHK). In this process, nearly 8 million people from all walks of life, including their families, were fired from their jobs, investigated, deprived of their freedom, ostracized from society, and almost driven to annihilation even though they had nothing to do with the coup.
Years before the coup attempt, dissidents were identified through unlawfully carried-out filings via the denunciations and unfettered and uncontrolled attainments of civil authorities, intelligence and even ordinary people. With the aforementioned profiling, 152,000 civil servants were dismissed from their duties without even taking their statements for their critical views about the government or for their affiliations with the Hizmet movement. Institutions and workplaces known to be close to Hizmet were closed, and nearly 200,000 employees were dismissed, deprived of all their inalienable rights.
Although there is an attempt to create a perception in the public opinion of Turkey and the world that the decree laws were issued solely for the purpose of dismissals, the actual situation was far more different than that. Turkey's political Islamist and ultra-nationalist government bloc has in effect purportedly abused the KHKs for a number of various "social genocide" methods against the Hizmet members and critical figures such as abduction, enforced disappearance, torture, long detention, years of solitary confinement, social isolation, marginalization, dehumanization and demonization. The violations of rights and social genocide practices to which the OHAL and KHK victims are subjected differ according to the arbitrariness and discrimination of the officials in the places the victims live or in the public and social areas they apply to.
Within this framework, the report identified 143 rights violations and social genocide practices. Since some of these practices are executed publicly, it is known to everyone. We have noted some of them during research and interviews. The fact that many violations of rights were noticed in this way shows the possibility that there may be many more violations of rights that have not yet been identified. In this regard, the study of rights violations will be updated in future editions with new applications and new findings.
