Erdogan, Recep Tayyip

Devlet Bahceli, leader of the M.H.P., one of the right-wing nationalist groups allied with Mr. Erdogan, denied any links to the mafia in comments on Tuesday.

Mr. Peker is not the only one with allegations of dirt against the government. Mr. Erdogan’s political opponents, sensing his growing vulnerability, have sought to expose allegations of corruption or abuse of power at every turn.

But Mr. Peker, with as many as four million viewers tuning in to his rambling, hourlong videos, is by far the most trenchant and damaging.

Among the unproven accusations he has tossed out are the illegal seizure of a marina by a government insider and the subsequent use of it for drug trafficking; the death of a woman who filed a complaint of sexual assault against a well-placed A.K.P. lawmaker; and even crimes that he said he committed himself at the behest of senior officials, such as instigating the assault of a former A.K.P. lawmaker, threatening university academics who signed a peace petition, and aiding Mr. Soylu, the interior minister, in his rivalry against Mr. Albayrak, Mr. Erdogan’s son-in-law.

Many of the allegations were directed against the former interior minister, Mr. Agar, and his son, who have both rejected the claims as baseless. The police have said that the woman who filed the sexual assault case had died in a suicide.

In an interview with the Turkish daily Cumhuriyet, Fikri Saglar, a former lawmaker, said, “We can call this the second Susurluk incident.” Mr. Saglar was a member of the parliamentary committee that investigated the 1990s scandal.

“It may be more serious,” he added. “Susurluk was like the foundations of exposing relations between politicians-mafia-the state, now traces of what this establishment has been doing are revealed.”

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ISTANBUL — Turkey’s health ministry on Saturday reported fewer than 20,000 new coronavirus cases in the previous 24 hours, a first since mid-March and 10 days into a lockdown.

The health ministry data shows 18,052 new cases and 281 new Covid deaths. The country’s seven-day average of new cases has been falling since April 20, when it hit a peak of more than 60,260 from fewer than 10,000 on March 3, according to data from the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford. The plunge in new cases has been equally sharp, dropping to fewer than 24,000 as of Saturday.

Deaths, which lag infections by weeks, have only just begun to fall. The seven-day average peaked on May 2 at more than 355 and has now dropped to just over 320.

In what President Recep Tayyip Erdogan billed as a full lockdown, the government ordered nonessential workers to stay home, except to go to the nearest grocery store, starting on April 29, to last for almost three weeks. Day-care centers and kindergartens are open only for the children of workers exempt from the curfew.

according to Our World in Data. The country mainly uses CoronaVac, developed in China, and has also distributed a small number of doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine.

Facing difficulties in securing enough vaccine, Turkey has resorted to postponing second doses. On April 12, the health minister, Fahrettin Koca, said 30 million more doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech would arrive in June. On April 28, he announced a deal to import 50 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine from Russia within six months.

It was an awkward diplomatic moment.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive, was left standing during a visit to Turkey this month as her colleague, Charles Michel, president of the European Council, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey settled into two chairs.

Ms. von der Leyen, the first woman to head the European Commission, weighed in on the situation for the first time on Monday, telling European lawmakers that she had concluded that the blunder happened because she is a woman.

“Would this have happened if I had worn a suit and a tie?” she asked, speaking to the European Parliament on Monday evening. “In the pictures of previous meetings, I did not see any shortage of chairs. But then again, I did not see any woman in these pictures, either.”

Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, a treaty that combats violence against women.

She also made another point: The diplomatic blunder only made headlines because there had been cameras in the room to capture the episode.

The Turkish public will see it as evidence of American double standards, and anti-Western forces in Turkey will use it to incite fury, he said.

Both opposition and pro-government leaders attacked the expected designation.

“This is an improper, unfair stance,” said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the largest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party.

Dogu Perincek, the leader of the ultranationalist Patriotic Party, in an open letter to Mr. Biden, questioned his authority to issue such a declaration. “As is known, the genocide against the Jews was adjudicated at an authorized court,” he wrote, “but regarding the 1915 incidents, there is no judicial ruling.”

The killings of Armenians occurred at the end of World War I during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the predecessor of modern Turkey. Worried that the Christian Armenian population would align with Russia, a primary enemy of the Ottoman Turks, officials ordered mass deportations in what many historians consider the first genocide of the 20th century: Nearly 1.5 million Armenians were killed, some in massacres by soldiers and the police, others in forced exoduses to the Syrian desert that left them starved to death.

Turkey has acknowledged that widespread atrocities occurred during that period, but its leaders have adamantly denied that the killings were genocide.

In the days leading up to Mr. Biden’s announcement, Armenians and human rights activists in Turkey expressed caution, partly because of years of political seesawing over the issue.

“Personally, it is not going to make me excited,” Yetvart Danzikyan, the editor in chief of Agos, an Armenian-Turkish weekly newspaper in Istanbul, said, pointing to a statement President Ronald Reagan issued in 1981 about the Holocaust that mentioned the “genocide of the Armenians” in passing.

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WASHINGTON — More than a century after the Ottoman Empire’s killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenian civilians, President Biden is preparing to declare that the atrocities were an act of genocide, according to officials familiar with the internal debate. The action would signal that the American commitment to human rights outweighs the risk of further fraying the U.S. alliance with Turkey

Mr. Biden is expected to announce the symbolic designation on Saturday, the 106th anniversary of the beginning of what historians call a yearslong and systematic death march that the predecessors of modern Turkey started during World War I. He would be the first sitting American president to do so, although Ronald Reagan made a glancing reference to the Armenian genocide in a 1981 written statement about the Holocaust, and both the House and the Senate approved measures in 2019 to make its recognition a formal matter of U.S. foreign policy.

At least 29 other countries have taken similar steps — mostly in Europe and the Americas, but also Russia and Syria, Turkey’s political adversaries.

A U.S. official with knowledge of the administration’s discussions said Mr. Biden had decided to issue the declaration, and others across the government and in foreign embassies said it was widely expected.

said in an interview with the Turkish broadcaster Haberturk. “If the United States wants to worsen ties, the decision is theirs.”

The legal definition of genocide was not accepted until 1946, and officials and experts said Mr. Biden’s declaration would not carry any tangible penalties beyond humiliating Turkey and tainting its history with an inevitable comparison to the Holocaust.

“We stand firmly against attempts to pretend that this intentional, organized effort to destroy the Armenian people was anything other than a genocide,” a bipartisan group of 38 senators wrote in a letter to Mr. Biden last month, urging him to make the declaration. “You have correctly stated that American diplomacy and foreign policy must be rooted in our values, including respect for universal rights. Those values require us to acknowledge the truth and do what we can to prevent future genocides and other crimes against humanity.”

Mr. Biden appears intent on showing that his commitment to human rights — a pillar of his administration’s foreign policy — is worth any setback.

Turkey’s tenuous cease-fire with Russia has allowed for already-narrowing humanitarian access, and in the Black Sea, to which American warships must first pass through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles on support missions to Ukraine.

“It may be harder to get Erdogan to agree to specific policies,” Mr. Jeffrey said.

He also raised the prospect that Turkey could force meticulous reviews to slow non-NATO operations at Incirlik Air Base, a way station for American forces and equipment in the region. Or, Mr. Jeffrey said, Turkey could do something to provoke new sanctions or reimpose ones that have been suspended, like taking military action against Kurdish fighters allied with American forces against the Islamic State in northeast Syria.

Pentagon officials have also noted the value of Turkish forces remaining in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of U.S. and other coalition troops by Sept. 11; Kabul and Ankara have a longstanding relationship that will allow some troops to remain in Afghanistan after the NATO nations leave.

Tensions between Turkey and the United States flared in December, when the Trump administration imposed sanctions against Ankara for its purchase and then test of a Russian missile defense system that Western officials said could expose NATO’s security networks to Moscow. The sanctions were imposed in the final month of Mr. Trump’s presidency, three years after Turkey bought the missile system, and only after Congress required them as part of a military spending bill.

At least 29 other countries have taken similar steps — mostly in Europe and the Americas, but also Russia and Syria, Turkey’s political adversaries.

said in an interview with the Turkish broadcaster Haberturk. “If the United States wants to worsen ties, the decision is theirs.”

Mr. Biden appears intent on showing that his commitment to human rights — a pillar of his administration’s foreign policy — is worth any setback.

“It may be harder to get Erdogan to agree to specific policies,” Mr. Jeffrey said.

ISTANBUL — The unpredictable roller coaster that has become Turkish politics was on full display this past week after 104 retired admirals publicly challenged President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in an open letter — and 10 of them ended up in jail, accused of plotting a coup.

It was no accident that the episode came as Mr. Erdogan finds himself in the midst one of the most intense political passages of his career, as the worsening pandemic and economy have left the president sliding in the opinion polls even as he amasses more powers.

To inspire the party faithful, Mr. Erdogan has returned again to herald one of his favorite grand ideas: to carve a canal, through Istanbul, from the Black Sea to the Marmara Sea to open a new shipping route parallel to the narrow Bosporus.

For now, the use of those natural waterwaysis governed by the Montreux Convention, an international treaty forged in 1936, between the two World Wars, in an attempt to eliminate volatile tensions over one of the world’s most vital maritime choke points.

blog, the Yetkinreport, “shifts the current agenda from the pandemic and the economy to fields that the A.K.P. likes.”

The pandemic’s toll is now worse than ever in Turkey, with more than 50,000 new cases recorded daily. An increasingly sharp economic crunch looms, too, as the government’s pandemic support for businesses is scheduled to end and inflation and unemployment remain alarmingly high.

In the midst of the troubles, Mr. Erdogan’s party has slipped to below 30 percent in a recent opinion poll, and his political ally, the Nationalist Movement Party, has fallen as low as 6 percent, making his re-election to the presidency in 2023 seem increasingly difficult.

Even his own supporters recognize that a bruising fight lies ahead. “We have entered the long two-year election process leading to the 2023 elections,” Burhanettin Duran, the director of SETA, a pro-government research organization, wrote in a column in the Daily Sabah newspaper this past week.

“Due to the recent declaration,” he said, referring to the admirals’ letter, “now there is a possibility that the process will be painful.” He predicted a combined domestic and international campaign against Mr. Erdogan’s government.

Mr. Erdogan has promised that his multibillion-dollar canal plan would create a construction and real estate boom and bring in revenue from an increase in shipping traffic.

Investigative journalists have exposed real estate deals in which prospectors from the Middle East have bought up much of the land along where the canal will be built.

Yet Mr. Erdogan said at a regional party congress in Istanbul in February that the project would go ahead, despite opposition.

“They don’t like it, do they? They are trying to prevent it, aren’t they?” he said in his keynote speech. “Despite them, we will build the Istanbul Canal.’’

The admirals are far from the only opponents of the canal. Others include the popular mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, along with environmentalists, ecologists and urban planners.

But the admirals raised particular ire from Mr. Erdogan and his fellow Islamists by including in their letter criticism of a currently serving admiral who was caught on video attending prayers with a religious sect.

The retired admirals made a point of reaffirming their adherence to the secular ideals of the Turkish republic’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Either way, it came a “terrible time,” said Nigar Goksel, the top Turkey expert at the International Crisis Group, especially because of the recent withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention.

According to data gathered by U.N. Women, the United Nations agency for women’s rights, 38 percent of Turkish women experience violence from their partner at least once in their lifetime, and more than one in 10 was subjected to domestic violence in the last 12 months. In the 2021 Global Gender Gap report, an annual review by the World Economic Forum that covers economics, politics, education and health, Turkey ranked 133 among 156 countries.

The protocol fail in Tuesday’s meeting comes at a crucial time in Turkey’s relations with the European Union.

In recent months, Turkey has emphasized a desire to improve relations with the bloc and to revive its process for joining. The meeting was intended to build momentum in a relationship that has been fraught with disagreements in recent years on issues like migration, maritime borders and customs arrangements.

“Whatever the realities on the protocol side, the incident clearly underscores the fact that Turkey was blind to the optics of how this would appear,” said Mr. Lesser of the German Marshall Fund. Those optics, he added, “will only underscore the sense that Europe is not on the same page when it comes to values, when it comes to diversity, inclusion and gender equality.”

That point was not lost on the offended party.

Ms. von der Leyen “seized the opportunity to insist on the issues related to women’s rights in general and to the Istanbul Convention in particular,” Mr. Mamer, her spokesman, said. “It would have been discussed certainly in any case, but obviously this sharpened her focus on the issue.”

Matina Stevis-Gridneff reported from Brussels, and Carlotta Gall from Istanbul. Monika Pronczuk contributed reporting from Brussels.

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ISTANBUL — Their happiness shines out of the photograph: 14 graduates of Turkey’s Air Force Academy celebrating their completion of a flight training program with a picture together in front of a fighter jet.

Within months, all but one of the group would be in jail, accused of joining a 2016 coup attempt that brought blood to the streets and threw the country into turmoil from which it has yet to emerge. Last November, 13 of them — the other was not on base, because he was getting married — were found guilty of trying to overthrow the constitutional order and sentenced to life in prison, their military careers and their dreams of flying F-16s dashed.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faced down the coup attempt and cracked down hard in the aftermath, imposing a state of emergency for two years, detaining 100,000 people and purging 150,000 public employees from their jobs. More than 8,000 military personnel were prosecuted for their part in the insurrection, including more than 600 trainees, cadets and conscripts — most in their early 20s — whose misfortune was to have been given orders that night.

Their fate has been largely overlooked in Turkey, where government rhetoric against the coup perpetrators is strident and families and lawyers of the defendants have been scared to speak out. But after the 13 were sentenced to life in prison — 12 of them receiving “aggravated life,” the harshest form of life sentence, without parole — some of their families decided to break their silence.

“We were not expecting them to be acquitted, to be honest, but we were expecting them to be released at least,” said Kezban Kalin, whose son Alper, 30, was among those sentenced. “But aggravated life?”

At first, the trainee pilots and their families had trusted in the system, in part because Turkey’s history has been littered with coups and lower-ranking troops had never been held accountable in such a way.

“When it comes to a coup, it is at the level of generals,” said Ali Kalin, Alper’s father, who is himself a retired army sergeant. “I want to emphasize the injustice. What did they do?” he said of the trainees.

In the summer of 2016, the group had just arrived at Turkey’s Akinci Air Base outside Ankara, the capital, to start training on F-16 fighter jets — the pinnacle of a 10-year military education. On July 15, they were called in to the base take an English exam and were then told to stand by to observe a counterterrorism operation.

But Akinci air base turned out to be the headquarters of the coup plotters, a collection of military personnel and civilians who that evening ordered troops to seize control of key installations, planes to bomb Parliament and a unit of commandos to capture Mr. Erdogan.

The president evaded capture, and in a cellphone interview with a television station, he called on members of the public to face down the putsch. By morning, troops loyal to the government had regained control and attacked Akinci air base, detaining many of those involved.

The trainee pilots had been largely unaware of what was going on, according to their statements to investigators and in court, which the government challenged and which could not be independently verified.

Their cellphones had been taken away — which was normal during a military operation — and the television had been removed from the mess hall where they spent much of the night sitting around, they said. They moved chairs, made tea. Some stood guard on the back entrance to the squadron building, and three were sent to the front gate and handed rifles, although the court found that they had not used them.

As the base came under fire from special forces troops, the trainees were told to leave, which most of them did around 8 a.m., driving their own cars. Alper Kalin arrived home scared and exhausted, but his parents reassured him.

“I did not think anything would happen to those trainees,” Ali Kalin said. “They did not use firearms. They were not involved in anything — just Akinci base was their place of duty.”

Eleven days later, the group was called back to the base to give testimony about the events, and they were immediately detained. Within hours, their names had appeared on a list of personnel purged from the military.

That was a bombshell for the trainees and their families from which they are still reeling. The pilots have been in detention ever since. When their parents and siblings tried to find them at police stations and army bases, they encountered insults and abuse. From being proud parents of celebrated military achievers, suddenly they were branded traitors and terrorists.

“I did not go to the hearings,” said Sumeyra Soylu, 25, whose brother Ali was one of the 13 detained. “There was a certain group of people, known as the plaintiffs, who were cursing and swearing loudly at the relatives of the defendants, and he didn’t want us ever to hear them.”

Then followed four and a half years of legal proceedings as prosecutors indicted more than 500 defendants in the Akinci base trial. In a courtroom the size of a sports arena at Sincan, outside Ankara, 80 trainee pilots went on trial alongside senior commanders and civilians accused of leading the coup. The United States-based Islamic preacher, Fethullah Gulen, was charged in absentia of being the mastermind.

Mr. Erdogan was listed among the victims of the events and was represented throughout the trial by his lawyer, Huseyin Aydin, who often clashed with the defendants and their lawyers.

“The target of the crime of breach of Constitution that many defendants, including the trainee lieutenants, were charged with was President Erdogan,” Mr. Aydin said in written answers to questions from The New York Times.

The trainees were charged with being members of a terrorist organization, trying to overthrow the constitutional order, murder and attempted murder, since eight civilians died in clashes at the entrance of the base. But the prosecution did not produce evidence that implicated them in the coup plot or the clashes that occurred, their lawyer said. The lawyer asked not to be named to avoid legal repercussions for himself.

As trainee officers, they are still undergoing their education and can only take orders, not issue them, he said. Akinci base was their place of work, so they should not be considered guilty simply for being present there, and their own commanders testified in court that the trainees had played no part in the events, he said. Yet in the end, they were convicted, along with all of the others present at the base that night, of trying to overthrow the constitutional order.

“The top commander received the same sentence. The lowest-level soldier received the same sentence,” Ms. Kalin said. “How is that possible?”

Mr. Aydin said that trainee pilots had provided support services that night to the coup plotters in place of the usual staff, including transporting pilots and guarding buildings and captives. “There is no doubt that the trainee pilots contributed to the coup attempt,” he said, adding that the conviction was not final and still had to go through the appeal process.

Many Turks opposed the coup. But as the crackdown has continued for more than four years and swept up many with no connection to the events surrounding it, they have become deeply unhappy with the state of justice.

Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s largest opposition party, supported Mr. Erdogan against the coup plotters but has since accused him of orchestrating a civilian coup when he rounded up tens of thousands of political opponents, academics, lawyers and journalists who had nothing to do with the coup attempt.

The purges in the armed forces were systematic, rooting out whole units and conducting yearly roundups. Only two pilots remain in the air force from the class of 2010, to which the group of 13 belonged, said a former classmate who was among those purged.

Mr. Kalin, who served much of his career in the gendarme, said: “Our trust in the law, in the courts, in justice, in the state, in the government fell to zero. Even below zero.”

By now, the purges and prosecutions have included thousands in the military — officers and cadets alike.

“Is it OK to darken the lives of that many people without discriminating between the innocent and the guilty?” said Hatice Ceylan, whose son Burak, 29, is among the 13 trainees sentenced. “They are just children. There are plenty like my son, rotting in jail.”

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ISTANBUL — In two surprise midnight decrees, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan withdrew Turkey from an international treaty on preventing violence against women and removed the head of the central bank, moves likely to please his followers but further estrange him from Western partners.

Mr. Erdogan had floated the idea of withdrawing from the treaty, known as the Istanbul Convention, for more than a year as he courted conservative and nationalist followers to shore up his flagging popularity. Opposition parties and women’s groups were opposed amid concerns over rising violence against women in Turkey and women’s groups immediately announced a protest rally on Saturday afternoon.

The president, who has increasingly insisted on greater control over the Central Bank, appears to have opposed a raising of interest rates by the central bank chief, Naci Agbal, before dismissing him.

Mr. Erdogan has steadily concentrated more authority into his own hands over his 18 years in power and his latest actions came amid a flurry of attacks on political opponents that seem intended to solidify his political base.

purchasing the Russian S400 missile system, and facing heavy fines against the state bank Halkbank for its role in violating sanctions against Iran. Mr. Biden has not talked to Mr. Erdogan since taking office, but his administration officials have already brought concerns about human rights into the mix.

Mr. Erdogan has also reiterated his desire to join the European Union. But his latest actions were announced just after a video conference with senior E.U. officials on Friday in which they called for a de-escalation in tensions and the moves appeared to be a calculated snub.

The Council of Europe said on Saturday that Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention was “deplorable because it compromises the protection of women of women in Turkey, across Europe and beyond.”

described the move as “a despicable act of recidivism, as well as a harbinger of early elections.”

Burak Ulgen, a writer, tweeted: “Abolishing Istanbul Convention means patting the men on the back, and tell them ‘Please go ahead you can kill women.’ The blood of all the women murdered in this country is on your hands.”

The decrees followed recent attacks on political opponents of Mr. Erdogan that seemed aimed at satisfying his political supporters.

On Wednesday, Turkey’s top prosecutor filed a complaint to the Constitutional Court to close down H.D.P., the largest pro-Kurdish party, accusing it of links to a Kurdish militant group. That brought a swift warning from the State Department that such a move “would unduly subvert the will of Turkish voters.”

On the same day, the Turkish Parliament voted to strip a prominent H.D.P. lawmaker and human rights advocate of his seat and ordered him removed from the chamber. And on Friday, a leader of the country’s Human Rights Association was detained in a morning raid on his house, one of similar 20 detentions in Istanbul and Ankara.

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