Turkey has thrown more light into how the group responsible for the July 15, 2016 aborted coup was able to recruit people into it fold.
Nearly 250 people were killed — excluding coup-plotters — and over 2,000 others injured in the unfortunate plot against democracy, which was strongly resisted by the people.
Turkey on Monday marked the third anniversary of the bloody attempt to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Briefing newsmen in Abuja on Monday, the Turkish Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Melih Ulueren said Fetullah Organisation (FETO) indoctrinate the people under various disguise.
He said: “It all started under the guise of a charitable education effort back in the 1970s. Fetullah Gülen and his followers disguised themselves as a benign education movement when they started the campaign of establishing schools in Turkey and later around the world.
“At the peak of their power, they controlled thousands of schools in Turkey and more than 800 educational institutes worldwide. In terms of their reach, they were unprecedented.
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“We now understand that this was the first step of an infiltration campaign where kids and their parents were recruited with the seemingly innocent first step of an infiltration campaign where kids and their parents were recruited with the seemingly innocent promise of a better education and a good job.
“These kids were put through school with academic and financial help and mainly a heavy hand in indoctrination.
“They turned into unquestioning foot soldiers of Fetullah Gülen who claims to be the “Chosen One”. The goal was to subvert the democratic foundations of the Turkish state and establish a new anti-democratic one under the absolute rule of Gülen.
“His students were also told that, to achieve their main goal of taking control of the state, they should remain hidden and they could eschew all ethical, religious or personal beliefs.”
He added: “Attaching great importance to confidentiality in its structure and calling the confidentiality as a “precaution”, the organisation gives “code” names to its members apart from their real names to ensure secrecy.
“In this way, this is a unique and peculiar armed terrorist organisation where its lower level members know each other by their code names and which has a “cell-type” structure.
“There were mass-scale exam cheating as well. In order to infiltrate the critical government posts, FETÖ affiliated students were provided with answers to entrance exams.
“There are currently many investigations into mass-scale exam cheatings in Turkey, including the Police Academy entrance tests, the Centralised Public Service Admission Tests, Military Schools and other governmental jobs.
“The handlers of those FETÖ members staffed at critical governmental posts kept their indoctrination up-to-date and passed on the instructions of their leader.
“As civil servants or military personnel, FETÖ members’ loyalty was not to the nation or to the state they served. They did not care about upholding the constitution or the legal system of the country.
“Thus, the organisation that disguised itself as an education movement gradually turned into a secretive operational structure aiming to transform the society by taking control of the Turkish state from within.
“As its strength grew, the organisation began to claim a global messianic mission, depicting Fetullah Gülen as the “Imam of the Universe”.
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