A bipartisan coalition of 54 US Senators addressed a letter to President Joe Biden, expressing their concern over a deteriorating human rights record in Turkey. The letter cited Turkey’s recent trends towards authoritarianism, in particular the jailing of journalists that oppose the government and its military involvement in Syria and Armenia, Massis Post reports.
According to the Senate letter, since the failed coup against him in 2016, Erdogan has been cracked down on domestic opposition, by systematically “[silencing] or [coopting] critical media outlets, [purging] independent judges and [replacing] them with party loyalists and [jailing] scores of journalists.
The Senators do specifically mention Turkish involvement in Azerbaijan’s aggressions against Nagorno Karabakh. “This war is just one piece of Turkey’s broader geopolitical goals in the region. Turkey and Azerbaijan are closely allied, in part due to their shared ethnic histories as Islamic Turkic nations. Armenia is the oldest Christian nation in the world, and sits directly in between Turkey and Azerbaijan, hindering the unification of the two Turkic nations”, as quoted by Massis Post.
The Senators hope that the United States will be able to bring an end to these abuses in Turkey.
