BBC link

As if this week hasn't been tumultuous enough already.

2016 has just been one mad surprise after another, hasn't it? From football to political upheaval of every description...

It's bad when the current PM looks like the smarter choice

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36813924

Brussels should fast track Turkey into full EU membership ASAP.
i look forward to the demise of the EU may it RIP ...

Looks like the coup has failed. Seems to be the week for it.

Turkey coup attempt: Some 6,000 people detained, says minister

"Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says parliament might consider a proposal to introduce the death penalty."

I've heard it said that moves are underway to turn Turkey into an Islamic State.

Whether this is true or not, I don't know, but it's looking, to me at least, as though democracy is dead in Turkey.

It's not a part of the world which I have ever wanted to visit, but I am now actively telling people to stay away.

That is allegedly the fear the army had, and why they tried the coup. They were afraid that the country is becoming too islamic and were worried about the safety of the non-Muslim population.

They do have a point, the rise of Islamic groups and ideals within Turkey over the last few years has been dramatic, to the detriment of non Muslims (there are large Christian (general) and Catholic (in particular) communities, which have allegedly had their rights curtailed).

Erdogan seems to be moving to a dictatorship, although he is incredibly popular with "his" people. He made a call on national television for people to stand up against the army, and they did... I don't think Cameron would have had much support from normal citizens taking on the British Army, if they tried a coup!

It's frightening how blind the Turks are to him. This is a man who let IS operate purely because they were taking on the Kurds, apparently not seeing where that would obviously lead. He's just a messed up scumbag.

Coups are rarely 'the whole army', they're usually a small group of senior officers/generals who use the armed forces to paralyse the country while they find and capture/klill the existing government and take over. You saw it in this one where the army tried to close roads and block bridges. The army very, very rarely gets involved in large scale conflict in it's own country and if it does you then don't usually have a coup any more, you have a civil war and nobody generally wins those.

Pretty much any soldier will not fire upon the population they've been indoctrinated to protect, even if ordered to. Soldiers are not actually robots and if ordered to kill innocent civilians the vast majority will refuse to do so. As happened in this case, it looks like the number of soldiers who were willing to fight the population was actually less than the number of civilians (police etc) who were prepared to fight them and had decent levels of equipment, if not tanks and jet fighters. Plus it appears that, in general, if the soldiers refused to fight nothing bad happened to them - they weren't shot by their own officers and the civilian population didn't attack them as collaborators if they refused to fight.

Basically put, the emotional/psychologcal cost of firing on civilians was very high and the cost of not doing so was very low. Unless you're one of the senior officers leading the coup, in which case it looks like things are going to go very badly for you.