THE worst that Kemal Kilicdaroglu has suffered so far, on the 450km (280 mile) protest march he is leading from Ankara to Istanbul, are blisters and broken toenails. In that sense, the 68-year-old leader of Turkey’s biggest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), is lucky. Other opposition politicians are in prison. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has jailed more than 50,000 people and sacked more than 110,000 in ever-wider purges following an attempted coup last July. Mr Erdogan and his Islamist AK party have muzzled the country’s media, stacked the schools, courts and army with loyalists and changed the constitution to grant the president untrammelled executive power.
“We had to do this, because we ran out of options,” said Mr Kilicdaroglu, his face sunburnt from the day’s hike. Mr Kilicdaroglu and thousands of fellow marchers had just walked 22km along a highway through 34°C heat, pausing at rest stops to nap and recharge mobile phones. Now several hundred were camped out for the night in a...Continue reading
from Europe http://ift.tt/2tQ4yjc
via https://ifttt.com/ IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment