After the July putsch in Turkey, President Erdogan has been tightening the noose around his opponents. According to latest reports, on October 30 the Turkish government dismissed another 10,000 public-sector employees allegedly involved in the failed uprising.

Most of the dismissed government employees belong to the noblest professions in society, i.e., education and medical care. Doctors, nurses, and teachers have been blamed for sins they did or did not commit, and their summary removals have added to the prevalent restlessness in Turkey. In addition to the education and medical sectors, media and journalism have also been targeted. Fifteen more media offices have been ordered to shut down.

Initially, the Turkish government blamed everything on the Islamist movement led by the US-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, and anyone suspected of being the remotest supporter of Gulen was put behind bars. Gradually, the Gulen connection lost its primacy and now the workers are being laid off even without any such allegation. The only eligibility for removal from a government job appears to be any disagreement with the government policy. Another sector that is being purged is the legal profession: lawyers, judges, and other paralegal officers are being removed in droves.

Incarcerations have added thousands to the prison population and some estimates put the number at over 20,000, most of them on trumped up charges. To date around 70,000 government employees have been shown the door and over 50,000 passports are reported to have been cancelled to prevent foreign travels of the suspected people. This situation one never finds in a functioning democracy; for this to happen an emergency has to be declared on one pretext or the other and that blurs the line between a dictatorship and a democracy. With the recent closure of 15 media houses, the total number of closed journalistic set-ups has reached a whopping 150.

This is only on the civilian side and if you look at the military personnel, over 10,000 uniformed functionaries have been accused of participating in the insurrection against Erdogan. The Turkish government has claimed that the rebels had around three dozen airplanes, an equal number of choppers, 75 tanks, and three ships. One wonders if they actually had that much on their disposal how could they fail? Why didn’t they make use of this force? Were these resources just for a display purpose even when the rebels were being beaten and arrested?

In addition to the supporters of the Gulenist Movement, another party whose supporters are being targeted is the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Just one week before the schools opened after the summer vacations, 11,000 teachers were suspended on charges of having sympathies with the PKK. The Turkish PM, Binali Yildirim, has said that over 15,000 teachers are suspected to be PKK sympathisers and suspected extremists.

Established in 1978, PKK is a left-wing organisation that operates in Iraq and Turkey. Since 1984, it has been waging an armed struggle against the Turkish state and claims to be fighting for the cultural and political rights -- including the right to self-determination -- of the Kurd population.

Estimates put the number of Kurd people in Turkey at around 20 per cent, making every fifth citizen a Kurd, but this segment is severely suppressed. The founder of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, has been famous for his Marxist leanings and notorious for his guerrilla fighting. He was just 30 when he started his ambushes against the Turkish forces. Caught in 1999 in Nairobi, with the help of the American CIA, he renounced his terrorist path. Brought to Turkey and sentenced to death. He was spared, thanks to the European Union’s policy against the capital punishment.

Turkey had been an aspiring candidate for the EU membership and did not want to reduce its chances by killing the Kurdish leader. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and since then he has been in jail for over 17 years now. He was just 50 when caught and now he is closing the seventh decade of his life by writing books in prison. Before his arrest, Ocalan had spent years in Syria that was wholeheartedly supporting the Kurd rebels in Turkey.

The present Turkish onslaught against the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, is mainly because of his father, Hafiz al-Assad’s support to the Kurd secessionists in Turkey. Due to this reason, Syria and Turkey almost never had friendly relations. Now with the Syrian government facing internal dissent, Turkey is taking advantage and creating more problems for its eastern neighbour by venturing deep into the Syrian territory apparently to hit the Kurdish rebels there. After Abdullah Ocalan announced his rejection of terrorism, he propounded the idea of ‘democratic confederation’.

In this confederation he wanted to include the four Kurd regions namely eastern Turkey that is considered northern Kurdistan, eastern Syria that is western Kurdistan, northern Iraq, i.e., southern Kurdistan, and finally western Iran, also known as eastern Kurdistan.

With this in mind, Ocalan wants to create a confederation of all Kurdish regions that could coexist peacefully with all its neighbours and work for the prosperity of this region. Sadly, it is only Iraq where the Kurds have been able to reclaim some autonomy; in other countries -- especially in Turkey -- they are still considered a subjugated people.

In the Kurdish troubles, over 40,000 Kurds have perished and now with a new excuse of the failed coup, the Turkish government is not only targeting the Gulen movement but also crushing the Kurds with an intensified vigour. Syria, that used to offer a safe haven to the Kurd fighters, is now an open field for Turkey to train its guns.

The Syrian government that traditionally helped the Turkish Kurds is unable to stop Turkish incursions into Syrian territories. Around 15 million Kurds in Turkey are now at the receiving end of the Turkish rage -- without any help in sight it is a disaster of a huge magnitude for the Kurds in Turkey.

Recently, one more step that Erdogan has taken is a direct attack on the freedom of the institutes of higher education (IHEs) in Turkey. Traditionally, the universities and IHEs in Turkey have been electing their own rectors and heads, but now the president of Turkey has assumed this authority to appoint rectors.

Against these dictatorial powers, the opposition parties in Turkey that initially opposed the putsch and stood behind Erdogan, are now reconsidering their position and have condemned the high-handed approach under the guise of a state of emergency. Similarly, the Western countries that had voiced opposition to the putsch are now criticising Erdogan for crushing the opposition.

During the past 100 years or so, the people of Turkey have seen many ups and downs -- from Kamal Ataturk to Adnan Menderes and then from Necmettin Erbakan to Erdogan, there has been a constant tug-of-war between the forces of democracy and dictatorship. After repeated coups and suppressions of democracy, in the 21^st century one had some hope that finally democracy will take roots. Alas, just as in Pakistan, the politicians themselves are trying to uproot it and the Turkish ruling party is in the forefront of this attack on democracy.

President Erdogan should have capped his economic success with his democratic credentials by taking on board the Kurds and other minorities by giving them their due legal, political, and human rights. If the present is any guide, this hope is perched on a shaky ground.