Page 2 - bne IntelliNews newspaper 14 July 2017

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July 14, 2017 www.intellinews.com I Page 2
Kilicdaroglu's
"Justice March" leaves Turkish opposition at
a crossroads
failed coup attempt, joining several deputies from the pro-Kurdish HDP who have been jailed on terror-related charges since the botched putsch.
In the government crackdown, about 50,000 people have been arrested and 120,000 have been dismissed, while 965 companies with assets of around TRY 41bn ($11.3bn) have been seized over alleged links to the coup plotters.
“Why did we march?” asked Kilicdaroglu, whose three-week protest march prompted comparisons to Mahatma Gandhi’s peaceful protests.
“We want justice not only for those who gather here, we want justice for everyone. We have marched for journalists and lawmakers who are in prison, for academics who have been sacked, and for the civil servants who have been wrongfully dismissed from their job, we have marched for all the oppressed,” the social democrat leader told the crowd which gathered in Istanbul’s Maltepe district, chanting “Rights! Law! Justice!” during his speech.
According to the CHP, 1.6mn people attended the rally, but the Istanbul governor office said only 175,000 people turned up.
In his one-hour long speech at the rally, Kilicdaroglu called for an end to a state of emergency that was declared shortly after the coup attempt and which allows President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the government to rule by decree.
He also demanded the release of imprisoned journalists and the restoration of the judiciary’s independence.
“This is not the end, this is just a beginning, our first step. This march marks a new climate, a rebirth,” the opposition leader declared. Erdogan and the government tried to belittle and discredit Kilicdaroglu’s march.
“The line represented by the CHP has now exceeded being the political opposition. It has come to a point where they are acting with terrorist organizations and the forces inciting them against our country,” Erdogan said on July 1, Hurriyet Daily News reported.
“Why is he torturing himself? He can take the high-speed train to Istanbul,” PM Binali Yildirim mocked Kilicdaroglu, calling on the opposition leader to halt the protest march.
But Kilicdaroglu’s march appears to have been
a rare triumph for the country’s cowed opposition.
“The government was caught so completely off guard by this act of protest that all it could do in the end was to provide security for the marchers, who garnered a lot of public sympathy on the way,” political commentator Semih Idiz wrote in a July 10 article for Hurriyet Daily News.
According to a survey carried out by Istanbul- based research company Istanbul Ekonomi Arastirma, 43% of the public supported the Justice March, while 53.5% disapproved of it.
The level of support for the march in the survey is larger than the 25.3% of the vote the CHP garnered in the November 2015 general election but less than the 48.6% the ‘No’ camp secured in the April referendum on introducing an executive presidency with sweeping powers.
As things stand now, the government is unlikely
to meet the opposition leader’s demands or soften its policies in the face of the mass rally. In fact, only a day after Kilicdaroglu ended his march
and read out his demands, in a sign of defiance the government widened the crackdown. Dozens of people, including several academics, were