WORLD BRIEFING / TURKEY
Thousands of people marched in Ankara to the mausoleum of secular Turkey’s founder to protest the arrests of university professors and others accused of involvement in an alleged plot to topple the Islamic-rooted government.
More than 5,000 people waved Turkish flags, carried posters of Turkey’s late leader Kemal Ataturk and chanted: “Turkey is secular and will remain secular!”
Authorities have charged more than 200 people, including politicians, journalists and military and police officers, in the investigation of the alleged secularist conspiracy to topple the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The case is part of a power struggle in Turkey between Erdogan’s elected government run by pious Muslims and secular elites backed by the military. The secularists ran the country after Ataturk, a war hero, founded the state in 1923 out of the chaos that followed the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
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