Erdogan declares state of emergency

Almost 20,000 members of the police, civil service, judiciary and army have been detained or suspended since Friday night’s coup, in which more than 200 people were killed when a faction of the armed forces tried to seize power.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a news conference following the National Security Council and cabinet meetings at the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey, July 20, 2016.

A spokesman for President Tayyip Erdogan said the government was preparing a formal request to the United States for his extradition.

European Union leaders have said that Turkey’s negotiations to join their bloc will be terminated if it brings back the death penalty, and have criticized the wave of arrests that followed the failed putsch.

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced early Thursday that the government has made a decision to declare a state of emergency for three months pending parliamentary approval after the failed coup to overthrow the government and install a junta run by former cleric Fethullah Gülen and his band of murderers.

“The president called in not to a TV station known as a government-aligned mouthpiece, but one that had retained some semblance of independence”, she says.

Turkey’s countermeasures have affected more than 50,000 people – judges, civil servants, military, police and others – as the country’s leaders seek to root out opponents and perceived internal dissent. “The state of emergency in Turkey won’t include restrictions on movement, gatherings and free press etc”.

We did not declare martial law. “Turkey has overcome this challenge and will come out of it stronger by investing more”, he concluded.

Markets were less than confident.

“I saw people jump in front of tanks, climb on top of them, again and again”. “I need markets to understand that we are going to survive this shock”.

Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said the state of emergency was aimed at averting a possible second military coup.

Officials continued to take action against university and school employees, shutting down educational establishments, banning foreign travel for academics and forcing university heads of faculty to resign.

Simsek said that “standards of the European Court of Human Rights will be upheld”, but didn’t elaborate.

Erdogan was already well down the path of accumulating control in the presidency, at the expense of democracy, after sliding over one seat at the end of his reign as prime minister.

The last executions in Turkey were in the mid-1980s and the death penalty was abolished in 2004. The Turkish government accelerated its crackdown on alleged plotters of the failed coup against Erdogan. He praised the bravery and sacrifice displayed by those who had lost their lives fighting against the coup and deemed them “martyrs”.

In their first telephone conversation since the attempted overthrow, President Barack Obama pledged U.S. assistance to Erdogan for the investigation into the putsch, which has threatened to once again raise tensions between the uneasy North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies. Some detained soldiers have been shown in photographs stripped to their underpants and handcuffed on the floors of police buses and a sports hall. A nationalist opposition party supported the state of emergency but other opposition politicians were uneasy. “But there are reasons to be hopeful, there are reasons to think that the scourge of coups, military takeovers in Turkey has finally been eliminated”, she says. He described a “virus” within the Turkish military and state institutions that had spread like “cancer”. Some 246 people were killed resisting the attempted coup, according to the government.