Mediaboss Marketing

On the eve of a meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Donald Trump on Tuesday, Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, living in exile in the United States, urged the West to push his homeland back to democracy.

"[T]he Turkey that I once knew as a hope-inspiring country on its way to consolidating its democracy and a moderate form of secularism has become the dominion of a president who is doing everything he can to amass power and subjugate dissent," Gulen writes in a Washington Post op-ed.

Gulen points to the 1,000 Turkish citizens detained late last month over supposed links to Gulen, who Erdogan blames for the unsuccessful coup attempt against him last summer.

Gulen denies involvement in the coup, and pointed out in the op-ed that he condemned it at the time. Still, he noted, Turkey's European allies and the United States should push the country back to the democratic goals it agreed to as a requirement for NATO membership.

The exiled cleric pointed to two "critical" measures he said would reverse Turkey's "democratic regression" a new civilian constitution "involving the input of all segments of society and that is on par with international legal and humanitarian norms, and drawing lessons from the success of long-term democracies in the West" and a school curriculum that emphasizes "democratic and pluralistic values and encourages critical thinking."

2017 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

See the original post:
Turkish Exile Leader Gulen: West Must Urge Democracy - Newsmax