Prosecutors find Gülenists everywhere except the AKP

On May 23, prosecutors demanded the arrest of two educators, Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakça, who have been on a hunger strike for 76 days for ruining public order with a potential to trigger acts of terror.

Reportedly feeding on water and sugar only, the two have been protesting their dismissal from public jobs with a state of emergency decree that was made possible after emergency rule was declared following the July 15, 2016, military coup attempt.

"We want our jobs back" was written on the placards they were holding next to the Human Rights Monument in central Ankara, just some 300 meters from the Education Ministry and the Prime Ministry. In the court case that started in Ankara on May 22, ranking generals and other military officers who are accused of plotting and implementing the coup on instructions of Fethullah Gülen, an Islamist preacher living in the U.S., started their defense before the judges.

The state of emergency decrees are meant to remove Gülen sympathizers from public offices who are believed to have been placed there with stolen exam questions and rigged job interviews arranged by the illegal Gülenist network for their long-term strategy to take the state apparatus from within. The claims of injustice in mass dismissals forced the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Parti) government to set up a commission to look into complaints which would also serve to decrease the number of files likely to go to the Constitutional Court and then to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

As a matter of fact, mass dismissals have not only affected suspected Gülenists but left-wing academics as well - thousands of them, like Gülmen and Özakça - as Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the social democratic Republican...