Turkish PM denounces 'conspiracies' against government

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/29/turkish-pm-conspiracies-erdogan

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Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has vowed to fight off a corruption crisis circling his cabinet, saying those seeking his overthrow would fail just like mass anti-government protests last summer.

Erdogan accused his opponents of trying to sap the power of Turkey and compared the latest allegations to the protest movement that centred on Istanbul's Gezi park.

"They said 'Gezi' and smashed windows. Now they say 'corruption' and smash windows. These conspiracies will not succeed," he told a cheering crowd in western Manisa province. "Their concern is not corruption, law or justice. Their only concern is damaging this nation's power."

Leading businessmen and officials have been targeted for alleged involvement in bribery, tender-rigging and illicit money transfers to Iran. Three cabinet ministers have resigned after their sons were detained as part of the investigation. Erdogan's government responded by purging about 70 police investigators involved in the case.

On Friday thousands of anti-Erdogan protesters clashed with riot police in central Istanbul. The trouble recalled protests in the summer, initially over development plans for Gezi park but which broadened into complaints of authoritarianism under Erdogan's Islamist-rooted AK party.

The corruption case threatens to tarnish Erdogan's moral appeal, and the crackdown on police has provoked a feud with the judiciary. Investors have dumped Turkish stocks and pushed the currency to an all-time low against the dollar, a slide that a cabinet reshuffle failed to halt.

The case turned more personal last week when Turkish media published what appeared to be a preliminary summons for Bilal Erdogan, one of the premier's two sons, to testify. Erdogan, who denies any wrongdoing, said Bilal was named to hurt him.

Erdogan's allegations of a foreign hand in the affair put the focus on Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric who preaches from self-imposed exile in the US, and whose Hizmet movement claims at least a million followers, including senior police and judges in Turkey.

Gulen denies involvement in stirring up the graft case. But he regularly censures Erdogan, a ex-ally with whom he fell out in a dispute for control over an influential network of Turkish cram schools, which prepare students for university exams.

In a vaguely phrased sermon uploaded to Gulen's website over the weekend, the cleric likened the current situation to dark historical episodes when "the masses were the playthings of demagogues, put to sleep and awoken at will". He predicted that the "funeral of this chaos, and the sacred days when the nation will be on a path to relief, are close".

Germany's foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, called for a thorough investigation of the graft allegations. "In a region marked by crises and conflict, we need Turkey as a stable anchor," he told the Sunday edition of Bild.

"We trust in the power of the Turkish state to investigate the corruption allegations irrespective of the persons involved," he said. "Succeeding in this is a measure of every state build on the rule of law."

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