Despite President’s Purges, Turkey’s Opposition Leader Charges Erdogan with Abuse

Treading on dangerous ground, the head of Turkey’s opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), Kemal Kilicdaroglu, charged on Saturday that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is turning a deaf ear to the nation’s “thirst for justice” as he kicked-off a massive,  four-day demonstration against the president. While Erdogan addressed a counter-demonstration, Kilicdaroglu proclaimed that, “eighty-million people have a thirst for justice” and declared that it was his job to “defend the innocents to the tyrants.” Erdogan has ordered the arrests of 50,000 Turks in the aftermath of a failed coup d’état in July 2016 and the removal from the jobs of another 150,000 – mostly academics, jurists and security personnel.