Turkey needs to be 'normalized'

Turkey was pulled into a nightmarish situation with the failed July 15 coup attempt. How the coup evolved, why Turkey's well-fed intelligence services could not gather information, take adequate measures and prevent the calamity the country was condemned to still remain a mystery. How all those failed top security agents and executives have retained their posts is yet another mystery from those days. Turkey has definitely always been a peculiar country but is even more so today.

The failed coup attempt and the subsequent reformatting of the Turkish state by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Islamist conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP) government through emergency law degrees have induced an atmosphere of fear into the country. Thousands of people sacked from public duties, many of them from the security apparatus, thousands of people put behind bars and the constant repeat of power worshipping rituals by diehard supporters of the president have obviously produced an anxious and uncertain climate in the country.

It is a very sad situation for the Turkish media to remain mostly silent to the country becoming the champion in terms of the most journalists behind bars. Naturally, might it be rather risky talking about journalists who were deprived of their freedom or comment about some of the 3,600 colleagues who have lost their jobs since the coup attempt? Yet, is it normal under any scale or mentality if, in a country, the number of journalists in jail was at a very high 33 on the evening of July 15, 2016, but reached 62 by the end of that month, climbed to 93 by the end of August, exceeded 120 in September, and reached 146 (155 according to some claims) by the end of November? Just yesterday, the Ankara chief of the Doğan Holding, a...