Turkish prosecutors are seeking an international arrest warrant for basketball player Enes Kanter, accusing him of membership in a terrorist organisation. The Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office has also prepared an extradition request as well as requested an Interpol red notice for Kanter, a Turkish citizen who has been a vocal critic of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The New York Knicks centre did not travel to London this week for his team’s NBA game because of fears over Turkish spies. The Knicks will play the Washington Wizards at the O2 Arena today, 17 January.
“I would love to go to London,” Kanter said. “It’s just very sad because I’m scared of my life because of Erdogan’s operation in a foreign country. The operations are very famous [for] hunting down people who are speaking out against the government.”
In an op-ed he wrote for the Washington Post, Kanter explained that “My decision not to travel to London was difficult from a competitive standpoint but much easier from a safety one. It helps put a spotlight on how a dictator is wrecking Turkey — people have been killed, thousands are unjustly imprisoned, and countless lives have been ruined. That is no game.”
Responding to the arrest warrant, he said that “Erdogan uses Interpol, the international law enforcement organization with 194 member nations, as a tool to have his critics arrested in other countries.”
Kanter was born in Switzerland to Turkish parents who later returned to their homeland. His Turkish passport was cancelled in 2017, which he said was because of his political views and an arrest warrant was issued for Kanter’s father, Mehmet, in June 2018 after he was accused of contacting members of a banned organisation. The former university professor lost his job after the failed military coup even though he publicly disavowed his son and his beliefs.
According to a Turkish state news agency, the prosecutor cited Kanter’s ties to Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania for nearly 20 years, when seeking the international arrest warrant. Kanter told CNN last week that he is a supporter of Gulen, and does visit him every two or three weeks in Pennsylvania where he lives.
Gulen has been accused by Turkey’s President of masterminding a failed 2016 military coup against him – a charge he has denied. He condemned the coup attempt as treason, claiming that “even if at the helm of the country there are people who would like to replace me and suppress me and oppress me at the level of blood-sucking vampires, even then I do not want to remove them with anti-democratic means”.
After the attempted coup, the purge of alleged Gulenists was stepped up, resulting in tens of thousands of people being dismissed from their posts and arrested. More than 50,000 people have also been imprisoned across Turkey in a massive crackdown by the authorities, following the failed coup. In May 2016, the Turkish government formally declared the Gulen movement a terrorist organisation.