ANKARA
Turkey is winning its battle against the "parallel state" structure on all fronts, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Wednesday.
"We are continuing to normalize state institutions by wiping out parallel state elements," Erdogan said during an awards ceremony for Turkish scientists in Ankara. "Those who used the TUBITAK scientific center to wiretap Turkey's senior officials and for treason are a disgrace."
Turkey's scientific and technological center TUBITAK drew considerable attention as it was cited in connection with the wiretapping of Turkey's senior officials, including Erdogan, who was prime minister at the time.
In December 2013, an anti-graft probe targeted several high-profile figures, including the sons of three former government ministers and leading Turkish businessmen.
The government denounced the probe as a "dirty plot" constructed by a "parallel structure," an alleged group of bureaucrats embedded in the country's institutions, including the judiciary and the police.
Since then, hundreds of police officers have been detained on charges of eavesdropping on Turkey's top officials, disclosing highly-sensitive information, forming an organization to commit crime and being a member of this organization, violating privacy, illegally seizing personal information and forgery of official documents.
Erdogan also stated he wanted Turkey to be an attraction center for domestic and international researchers, as it was in the past.
"We have to further liberate science from the tutelage of politics and law," Erdogan said. "Getting involved with clothing, beards etc. of people in university has no logical explanation. Expelling the people of science from the country because of conflicting views does not suit science. Turkey has had to deal with that in education for decades," he said.
"What we need vis-à-vis the West is self-confidence, not feeling small," he added.
Once again criticizing the earlier language reforms abolishing Ottoman era-script and language, Erdogan said "Ottoman-era Turkish language was made to disappear and now we are compelled to use Western terminology for scientific knowledge."
The Turkish people have used a number of different alphabets throughout history, including the Arabic alphabet.
Later on, intellectuals, including Abdul Hamid II, the 34th sultan of the Ottoman Empire, suggested that Arabic letters should be improved upon to make reading and writing easier.
In 1928, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey, introduced the current 29-letter Turkish alphabet to replace the previous Persian-Arabic script. The present Turkish alphabet is derived from the Latin one.
The use of the new alphabet was made compulsory in all public communication.
Replacing the Arabic script was defended on the ground that it was not appropriate for authentic Turkish phonology, but some argue the change caused Turks to be cut off from the literary heritage of the Ottoman era.
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