The west is supporting terrorism against Turkey, claims Erdoğan

Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has accused the west of supporting terrorism and siding with organisers of the failed coup attempt, as football referees and other members of the sport’s national association became the latest targets of a wide-ranging government crackdown against alleged plotters.

Nearly 100 people, including several referees, have been fired by the Turkish football federation, two days after it announced all its committee members had resigned to “assist investigations” into the group accused of planning the coup.

The sackings will not cause disruption to the country’s passionate football fans, the private Doğan news agency said, as only one of those sacked was from the top Super League. But the targeting of sports officials is likely to deepen concern among Erdoğan’s critics that the coup has sparked a disturbingly broad purge.

So far, 70,000 people have been suspended from work and more than 18,000 detained, across sectors from the media and publishing to education and the military, according to Associated Press.

For supporters of the Turkish president, however, the firing of so many football officials will likely be taken as further evidence of how the group he accuses of having masterminded the coup, followers of exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen, have infiltrated every corner of Turkish society.

Those fierce divisions about how the coup was planned, and how the government should respond, have strained Turkey’s relationships with western nations.

Erdoğan’s most recent broadside against unnamed western countries came as Turkey’s justice minister made a fresh demand for Washington to hand over Gülen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999.

His movement, which Ankara characterises as a terrorist organisation, runs schools, charities and businesses internationally. Washington’s refusal to hand him over without formal extradition proceedings has infuriated Erdoğan, who says the US is wilfully sheltering the mastermind of the violence and even accused a top American general of supporting the coup.

“The west is supporting terrorism and taking sides with coups,” Erdoğan said at an event for foreign investors in the Turkish capital. “They have actors inside [Turkey] but the scenario of this coup was written abroad.”

Ever since the failed putsch of 15 July, Erdoğan has repeatedly accused western powers that criticise his crackdown of worrying more about the fate of coup plotters than threats to democracy in an Nato ally.

Western powers in turn have warned Erdoğan that he should not be using undemocratic methods to counter a threat to democracy, raising particular concerns about the suggestion Ankara could re-introduce the death penalty.

Turkey and the west urgently need to work on repairing a relationship that is critical to tackling challenges from the refugee crisis in Europe to the battle against Isis, but their individual grievances may make it a slow process, warned analyst HA Hellyer, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Centre for the Middle East.

“Neither the perception of Ankara engaging in overreach, nor the perception of western insensitivity to the grave losses that Turkey has already suffered, will aid in that regard at all,” he wrote in a recent analysis.

The US government says it needs evidence of Gülen’s involvement and the extradition process must run its course. Officials asked for “further information” after Turkey sent an initial letter requesting that Washington hand him over, which the Turkish justice minister said had now been supplied in a second letter.

But the dispute is likely to complicate relations for some time, said Hellyer, who is also a fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London.

“As of yet, no US or European political establishment agrees with Ankara’s claims on Gülen, and the United States has made it clear that no extradition will take place without the provision of indisputable evidence of direct culpability.

“Despite Ankara’s claims to have provided such, [Washington] as yet disagrees, and that impasse is unlikely to disappear any time soon.”

Erdoğan’s general broadside against the west was followed by a specific attack on the European Union for failing to respect its side of a refugee deal, and on Amnesty for warning it had “credible reports” of torture among detainees after the coup.

He insisted Turkey had “zero tolerance” of torture, accused Amnesty of ignoring violence by coup plotters and invited them to visit the country to “see who did what to who”.

Erdoğan also lashed out at the Italian justice system, saying in an interview on Tuesday that a money-laundering investigation into his son, Bilal, a student at Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, could damage bilateral relations between the two countries.

The investigation has included Bilal at the behest of a Turkish businessman and political opponent of Erdoğan, Murat Hakan Uzan, who called on police to investigate allegations that Bilal illicitly funnelled money into Italy.

Erdoğan told Rai, the Italian public broadcaster, that prosecutors should “be handling the mafia instead”.

Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister, hit back at the remarks in a tweet, saying that Italy’s judges answer to the constitution, not to the president of Turkey. “We call this system the rule of law, and we’re proud of it,” Renzi said.