A
group of activists from the UK raised 40,000 euros for needy Turkish nationals
who have landed in Greece as refugees in the face of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s
post-coup witch-hunt.
Bold
Medya online news outlet reported Tuesday that the group has collected 40,000
euros in online donations and handed over the sum to the Time to Help, the charity
organization that works in support of people in need across the world.
Group
members told Bold Medya that their campaign, Walk across Europe–Help refugees
in Greece, started in Belgium on Feb 2 and continued to cover Luxembourg,
Germany and France.
The
group consisted of 17 people
from different backgrounds who walked around 50 kilometers in total in
solidarity with the refugees who had to walk much longer distances escaping the
persecution in their hometown.
“It
is fair to say that a massacre is happening in Turkey right now. They persecute
innocent people. We want to let Europeans and people in the US know about what
is happening in Turkey,” Mouchamed Ekmel
Intze, one of the group members told Bold.
Why
are Turks fleeing?
Thousands of people have fled Turkey due to a massive witch-hunt launched by the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government against its critics such as academics, Kurdish politicians and sympathizers of the Gülen movement, in the wake of a failed coup attempt on July 15, 2016. The government accuses the movement of masterminding the coup while the group denies involvement in the putsch.
More than 220,000 people have been detained and some 90,000 including academics, judges, doctors, teachers, lawyers, students, policemen and many from different backgrounds have been put in pre-trial detention since last summer.
Many tried to escape Turkey via illegal ways as the government cancelled their passports like thousands of others. Thousands cross Evros river to escape from the snowballing persecution. Around 14,000 people crossed the Evros frontier from January through September of this year, the Wall Street Journal said earlier underlining that around half of those crossing the Evros river were Turkish nationals.
On July 19, a
woman and her three children died after a boat
carrying a group of Turkish asylum seekers capsized in the Evros River while
seeking to escape Erdogan’s crackdown.
In a separate
incident on Feb 13, at least three people died and five others
were missing their boat fell off in the river the same way.
