Here's the reason: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37868441
More political prisoners: The Pro-Kurdish HDP opposition party's leaders and several MPs have been arrested by the Government.
That's how pay for play works, everybody. If you don't pay, your government is labeled as a dictatorship. Simply fallen from the US grace. The UN is just a diplomatic tool to discredit you and NATO is another tool to kill you.
I'm pretty confident that it has nothing to do with pay, but with geopolitics. In fact, I think the U.S. generally gives them more money (and other aid) than vice versa. The former three are allies and provide essential value to the U.S. Off the top of my head:
Turkey gives NATO an very valuable geopolitical position, with leverage as the most powerful nation in the Mideast neighborhood, as well as dominating the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean, and providing a position on the southern flank of Russia, eastern flank of the Balkans (less essential post-Cold War), and a stable border with countries to the east and south. Turkey as an enemy would be a serious headache.
Qatar and especially Saudi Arabia, the wealthiest and most powerful Arab state, give the U.S. leverage and stability (at least for decades until recently) in the Mideast, which, due to the oil supply, is essential to world peace and prosperity. They also counter-balance to Iran.
Those benefits don't necessarily justify supporting oppression, but those are very serious considerations.
Well, parent was trying to highlight that what you wrote should be a footnote every time there are big words of bringing "democracy" to other countries by the said actors.
I am from Egypt, I remember very well, when the revolution of June 2013 broke out against the muslim brotherhood, the US said it stands with the "legitimate" regime (back then morsi), when they were toppled, the US said it was coup (funny they said it was a revolution when it was against Mubarak). And everyone here is suffering from an unofficial economic embargo enforced by the US on us ever since.
It is simply a coup or a revolution, a democracy or a dictatorship, depending on the "relations" between the US politicians and these governments.
2) Mubarak was also forced to resign by the same military council in February 2011 and the military council ruled until June 2012 when morsi was elected, it just wasn't called a "coup" and "military dictatorship" back then by the western media.
Stalin and many (most?) other dictators also have staged elections. From the article you linked:
----
Of the 30 proposed candidates, only 10 were allowed to participate in the presidential election by the Presidential Election Commission. One prominent candidate not allowed to run was Talaat Sadat, the nephew of former President Anwar Sadat, who appealed his disqualification unsuccessfully.
Egypt's largest Islamic group, the Muslim Brotherhood, was not permitted to field a candidate ...
----
And also:
official results showing he won 88.6% of the vote. Mubarak's opponent, Ayman Nour, of the Tomorrow Party, is estimated to have received 7.3% of the vote and Numan Gumaa received 2.8%,
Numbers like that are unseen in any legitimate election. The highest in U.S. history was 61%.
Still not more dictatorial than detaining tens of thousands and even freeing thousand of criminals to get some room for the alleged coup plotters, a coup where a couple of hundred young soldiers most of whom didn't even know what was going on, and laying off hundreds of thousands of people from all professions (academia, sport, journalism). At the same time, his army is crushing kurd civilians not only in Turkey, but now in Syria and Iraq.
Who is more like Stalin do you think? Mubarak or Erdogan?
2.0a) As soon as Morsi got elected, his Muslim Brotherhood started passing laws to make the country in their image, and in a short period of time, would have become an Islamic dictatorship. I'm no fan of Sissi's coup but there was no democratic outcome after that election.
Wow. How can Egyptians be so poor in their understanding of the Politics of Egypt. Time and again.
- Mubarak was America's best friend. American's public support for Egyptian democracy? Yeah, that's just for show.
- Who else was America's best friend? The Egyptian army. 90% of US aid goes to propping of the Egyptian military and has for decades (basically the army is in their pockets). America and IDF has had an excellent working relationship (ie help with killing Palestinians) with the Egyptian military for decades.
- Americans didn't like Morsi at all, Although overtly they claimed to support Egyptian democracy.
- Eventually Morsi, messes up. And guess who is there to save the day? Why its the Egyptian Army! Morsi tried to restrict democracy. Sisi will defend democracy by removing it entirely. Next thing you know the entire democratic elected cabinet is on death row and Mubarak is slowly but surely having his charges removed, while living under 'House arrest' in his comfy house.
- Who is now emperor of Egypt? Why its America's point man and best buddy for decades, Sisi (This is purely coincidence, wink wink ). America will very loudly suspend all aid to the dictatorship, only to very quietly resume it a year later.
What do you mean pay for play, here? Please tell me how Turkey, Quatar and Saudi Arabia are "paying" for anything in terms of meaningful value for the US.
This is simple geopolitics, not some corruption scandal.
1. These governments are for example "donating" hundreds of millions every year to many politicians in the US. One of them is may be going to be the next president.
2. Look at the ads and sponsors in the big news channels like CNN, mostly institutions and companies owned by these countries (Qatar airways, Turkish airlines, Dubai, Abu Dhabi...), no wonder on the day of the "coup" against Erdogan, These media outlets labeled his "supporters" as pro-democracy. That never happened for Hosni Mubarak who was labeled as an evil dictator for example, he just didn't pay simply.
3. The west is trying to push the story that the conflict in Syria is just between white "the rebels" (FYI they are actually Sunni islamists) vs black "Assad" (he is a dictator yeah, but not worse then Erdogan), it is the same opninion of these governments.
4. No one is condemning or even talking about the horrific crimes like Turkey against the kurds, Saudi Arabia killing thousands of Shia in Yemen, Qatar funding militant islamists all over the world.
Dude he's a billionaire, of course he invests huge amounts of money in things.
To suggest the US wants Saudi investment in its stock market that has the sole impact of pushing up one cable company's stock price is absurd and obtuse.
- Mubarak was a much stronger ally to the US than Erdogan ever was. So by your logic they would've had to support him even more.
- Erdogan – terrible as he may be – was until recently legitimately elected. I say until recently because (even some time before the coup) he started undermining democratic institutions, mostly the press. Mubarak was never elected in anything but a sham election.
These governments are not donating "hundreds of millions" to politicians. If you can find evidence for that, make it public. Because it's illegal to take money from foreign governments/nationals. Yes – the Clinton foundation did (because it's not a politician, and in turn spends the money on its causes). But it's nowhere near "hundreds of millions", and it had started years before HC became important. And there's no indication that Clinton's behavior vis-a-vis these government was any different than it had been the 40 years before or the three years since her tenure.
Assad is indeed worse than Erdogan, considering he's killed hundreds of thousands, some with chemical weapons.
Everyone is talking about Turkey. There'll be sanctions, their membership in NATO may be frozen. But the problem is simply that there isn't that much that can be done. If you sweep in and bomb Ankara – well, take a look at Iraq. You'll also create incentives for similar countries to acquire nuclear weapons. And there's a principle of non-involvement: Start bombing people (again), you'll make it even easier for Russia to claim legitimacy when they invade something they'd like to have.
If you think Saudi Arabia, the country that executes gay people, is contributing to the Clinton foundation to promote charity, you are beyond reasoning with.
> no wonder on the day of the "coup" against Erdogan, These media outlets labeled his "supporters" as pro-democracy. That never happened for Hosni Mubarak who was labeled as an evil dictator for example
Mubarak was a dictator and Erdogan is democratically elected.
> "Assad" (he is a dictator yeah, but not worse then Erdogan)
I very strongly disagree. How many people has Erdogan killed? Did Erdogan use chemical weapons on his own people? Invite the Russian military, Iranian military, and Hezbollah into his country to kill his own people? I strongly dislake Erdogan, but there is no comparison.
> No one is condemning or even talking about the horrific crimes like Turkey against the kurds, Saudi Arabia killing thousands of Shia in Yemen
I've heard plenty of talk about it, but people aren't dying on nearly the same scale as in Syria.
Mubarak was elected in an election about as free as the last one for Erdogan. Where Mubarak jailed most opposition and killed and bombed their supporters into submission, Erdogan jailed them and killed and bombed their supporters into submission.
The changes in Turkey have happened pretty recently and as Turkey is a NATO member (where some nukes are located) and is a crucial player in Syria, most other NATO members look away when this kind of things happen.
I expect huge diplomatic backlashes when the situation in Syria stabilizes. But I'm a bit of a dreamer.
Indeed you are. Syria will not "stabilize" for a long time, for the simple fact that Turkey went for a land grab (motivated mostly by anti-Kurdish strategies, but hey, a land grab is always a good thing in itself, right?) that will remain an issue of contention for decades, regardless of how the civil war is settled. Turkey needs a weak Syria, and everybody (US, Russia) needs Turkey. We have just created yet another Kashmir.
Saudi Arabia was (until massive backlash and attention) on the Human Rights board of the UN. You know, the country that stones women and sponsors terrorism. In a totally unrelated series of events, they have also donated millions upon millions of dollars to the election campaigns of US officials. Surly Saudi Arabia is just a powerhouse when it comes to Human Rights and they really deserved that spot.
Please note, this is just one obvious example. Read into this topic more. Ignorance and lack of research doesn't mean people are "paranoid". Easy to dismiss uncomfortable truths by calling people paranoid and conspiracy theorists.
Do you even know how the UNHRC works or how much of a farce it is?
Member states are rotated every 3 years. The council is heavily controlled and influenced by middle eastern and African nations, supported by China, Russia and Cuba, which protect each other from criticism. Even Ban Ki-moon has called the council ineffective. An example of this influence is that it criticises Israel more than all other countries combined - which, remember, include North Korea, Syria, China, Turkey, Libya, Burma, Zimbabwe, etc.
Except democracy relies on freedom of the press in order to operate. Brainwashing a population into supporting one guy and holding elections every so often to confirm the brainwashing is working isn't democracy.
In case the government wants to shut down communication that's a very bad idea. In a global network, it's relatively easy to hide traffic in other traffic. Encapsulation and encryption work just fine.
In a physical world, if you want a mesh (RF I'm guessing) network, it's trivial to figure out who's forwarding. You can do that with a cheap scanner and go straight to the doors of people running nodes. If you're trying to stay stealthy and secure from gov/mil, radio mesh is a terrible idea.
You still need internet for this to work ;) these boxes only work in places where the internet isn't going to be shut down on a whim.
Countries that are willing to blanket the internet and do mass arrests aren't exactly the place where you want to be caught with those things.
This is the problem with all the so called "freedom" tools (tails, tor, various vpns etc.) and it is that they essentially only provide safe "freedom" to people who are already generally free.
well you can run something like the nextcloud box on a local network, no problem, and it's super cheap, too. If government blocks the pipes to services like Twitter etc, that sucks but doesn't block local, self-hosted services. They are hard to block unless you take down the entire internet - and THAT is an economic issue.
Again this is utterly pointless in any case where you live in a country that has no issues with blocking internet access.
You somehow think that a government that blocks the internet on a regular basis would have a problem blocking a distributed P2P network if it posed a threat?
All ISP's do DPI these days, many ISP's don't allow users to host services in the first place.
No to mention that the existence of the Box alone can put you at risk of harassment if not imprisonment.
Freedom tools are great if you live in a country that won't send you to prison for using a VPN, people seem to do not understand how oppressive regimes work.
Turkey is in a really weird place. On the one hand, Erdogan is a corrupt tyrant who has done some inexcusably horrible things. On the other hand, he has thoroughly cleaned the cemaat infestation. For the record, cemaat refers to people loyal to a man named Fethullah Gulen, who is a radical Islamist and a very controversial figure in Turkey. You can read more about him here:
Anyway, Internet blockages like this usually precede widespread police operations. Based on what I can gather from Turkish newspapers right now, it looks like HDP headquarters is being raided by the police as part of a terror investigation (which is kind of a big deal). HDP is a pro-Kurdish, pro-minority party that got a lot of votes in the last election and prevented Erdogan's AKP from reaching parliamentary majority.
While he probably has more than one agenda, neither the US, Israel nor any EU nation has never put him or his followers on any watch list, and at least publicly he strongly condemned any act of terrorism and incitement.
He is such and "islamist" that he was probably the only major religious leader that didn't put the blame on Israel for the Flotilla incident and rather said that the organizers should have cooperated with them and put more effort into ensuring that radicals would not join the flotilla, this doesn't exactly seem like something a Terrorist would say publicly on several occasions and probably didn't made him any friends on either side of the political spectrum.
I never called him a terrorist. Please read more carefully.
Also, since you obviously haven't read the link I provided, here's an excerpt from a speech he gave in 1999 in which he talks about... well, I'll let you be the judge:
"You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers. . . . Until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria, . . . like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. . . . The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it. . . . You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey . . . . Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence . . . trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here, [just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here."
Sorry you just called them an "infestation", and him a radical Islamist.
Terrorism and corruption charges in Turkey don't mean much, Erdogan has used this to demolish every political opposition, close newspapers, put anyone from judges to school teachers in prison and to cleanse the military which was the only organization with the mandate and ability to keep Turkey in the image that Kemal Ataturk envision.
Tbh it could come from any "revolutionary" pablum, simply because that's how you do it: put your avanguardist elements in place until conditions are right for the "big switch". Even legitimate parties in legitimate democracies follow this rulebook to reach and maintain power.
I personally would not trust anything I read about him on Wikipedia, since it can be edited by just about anyone, and he is estimated to have about 5 million followers. Read the link I provided - it's a lot more objective and provides a lot of historical perspective as well.
It's hard to see Gulen as worse than Erdogan, who has invaded Iraq, oppressing his population, reignited war with and is killing Kurdish people, and building relations with Russia. He's outlawed criticism of himself and arrested people for it, shut down newspapers ...
> he has thoroughly cleaned ...
The upside to every dictator, with just different endings to the sentence. Too bad for the innocent people imprisoned, whose lives have been ruined. No problem for you and me, so it's a good thing.
Freedom and rights mean for everyone else; everyone believes in freedom for themselves.
There were many lawsuits against Gulen and his sympathizers (Hizmet movement) even in US - but he was acquitted many times.
Erdogan put all the blame on him and his followers to suppress corruption investigation into his circle of politicians and even family members. Read about Reza Zarrab prosecuted in US right now.
