Congressional Testimony from MEF’s Michael Rubin on Turkey’s Authoritarian Crackdown

The following testimony was prepared for the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission hearing, “Can Turkey Find Its Way Back to Freedom? Authoritarian Consolidation versus the Defense of Turkish Democracy,” held on June 3, 2026.

Chairman Smith, Chairman McGovern, and honorable members, thank you for the opportunity to testify. Just under one year ago, I testified before you about human rights in Turkey.

As I sit here today, I am reminded of an old Soviet joke about the difference between a pessimist and an optimist: A Soviet pessimist complains about how bad everything—war, environment, economy, and health—has become. The Soviet optimist shakes his head and quips, “Don’t complain. They could always get worse!”

Unfortunately, this past year has made me a Soviet-style optimist. Last year, I traced how President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan leveraged U.S. wishful thinking if not outright naivete and documented his insincerity toward both ethnic minorities inside Turkey, and discrimination and incitement toward religious minorities. I will not repeat the examples I discussed last year, as I discussed these in my written testimony from that hearing.¹ Unfortunately, there are no shortage of other issues to now address. What is most important, however, is not simply to chronicle Turkey’s many abuses; many organizations do that. Rather, it is to understand that a bipartisan U.S. policy that calls out and seeks to reverse those abuses is good not only for Turkey and the broader region, but also broader U.S. national security, peace, and stability.

The human rights situation in Turkey has worsened considerably over the past year for two interrelated reasons. First, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan prioritizes his own power and enrichment over rule-of-law. He and his wife Emine have risen from poverty to become billionaires several times over, with little other explanation as to the source of their wealth other than embezzlement and corruption.

The second reason for this past year’s sharp decline in Turkish human rights rests in Washington. President Donald Trump and a coterie of top policy advisors have convinced Erdoğan he faces no consequence for abuse. U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack’s see-no-wrong embrace of Erdoğan appears giddy. While no administration has held Erdoğan to the account he deserves, the sense of impunity he now feels encourages him to abuse human rights. Turkey is now as repressive if not more than at any time since its founding, inclusive of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his successor İsmet İnönü’s dictatorship and periods of military rule in the early 1960s and 1980s.

Erdoğan has dominated Turkey for almost a quarter century. Supports and detractors both agree he is Turkey’s most consequential leader since Atatürk. In the 15 years he ruled Turkey before alcoholism claimed his life, Atatürk transformed Turkish society and built a laical foundation for the new country. Erdoğan systematically seeks to undo that laicism and transform Turkey into a conservative Islamic state. In 2012, he declared explicitly his goal to “raise a pious generation.” What tourists see in Sultanahmet and Beyoğlu is essentially a theme park, as divorced from the rest of Turkey as the Upper West Side of Manhattan is from the South Bronx. Few tourists will ever visit Sultanbeyli which better reflects the Erdoğan’s Turkey, Islamist, conservative, and impoverished.

This does not mean that Turkey will become the Islamic Republic of Iran. There are other models that Erdoğan may pursue: Pakistan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia (after a two-decade pause) tolerate managed plurality at home but support Islamist extremism abroad. While tens of millions of Turks have spent their entire school years and army service under Erdoğan’s rule and subject to his efforts at indoctrination, many resist the imposition of his religious mores, though he has made greater progress in inciting anti-Americanism and nationalist conspiracies across society.

Today, Erdoğan believes he can act with impunity in his violation of human rights, corruption, terror support, and consolidation of control. While his attacks on political opposition date back more than a decade, the brazenness of his targeting of individual competitors now dates back a decade. On November 4, 2016, Turkish police arrested Selahattin Demirtaş, leader of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP), on charges relating to HDP criticism of Turkish policy toward the Islamic State. While Erdoğan resented Demirtaş’ advocacy for Kurdish rights, the charges were preposterous. Erdoğan’s own government supported Al Qaeda affiliates and supported the Islamic State siege of Kobane. As Demirtaş today serves a decades-long sentence, Hakan Fidan, who as Erdoğan’s intelligence chief provided logistical support if not weaponry to the Islamic State and organized the kidnapping of dissidents across the globe, is foreign minister.

The real reason for Demirtaş’ arrest appears to be vengeance. While a simple narrative about Turkey’s history suggests ever-present tension between Turks and Kurds based on ethnicity, the reality is more complex. During Atatürk’s rule, Kurds repeatedly rose in rebellion not only because of ethnic tensions, but also because they resented what they perceived as Atatürk’s attack on religion. Kurds remained religiously conservative throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Many are religious today, albeit following a more traditional Anatolian Sufi practice than Erdoğan’s Muslim Brotherhood-inspired exegesis.

Erdoğan understands this and long harbored hopes that he could augment his Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) – Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) coalition with Kurdish votes, perhaps 20 percent of Turkey’s electorate. He reached out to Kurds with rhetoric of Islamic solidarity. Many Kurds dismissed Erdoğan promises and assumptions, and decided to vote for the HDP anyway, in no small reason because Demirtaş’ campaigned so effectively. The Kurdish rejection bruised Erdoğan’s fragile ego—in many ways, he is a snowflake dictator—but the more important point is how the incident reflected just out-of-touch with Turkish society Erdoğan has become.

In the June 2015 general assembly elections, the HDP won 80 seats, forcing a readjustment that led Erdoğan’s party to lose 69 seats and lose its outright majority. Erdoğan sought early elections to regain his majority. He achieved this in November 2015 elections that international observers denounced as marred by fraud. Still, the HDP squeaked past the ten percent threshold that enabled it to enter parliament rather than have its seats redistributed. Erdoğan was furious. It was against this backdrop that he ordered Demirtaş’ arrest. That only a few hundred Kurdish supporters came to the streets to protest Demirtaş’ detention convinced Erdoğan that he could kneecap the political process, arrest his opponents, and contain fallout with riot police deployments. While Tom Malinowski, then-assistant secretary of State for Human Rights stated that the U.S. was “deeply troubled,” the U.S. response did not extend beyond finger-wagging.

In hindsight, the tepid reaction to Demirtaş’ arrest set the stage for Erdoğan to arrest Ekrem İmamoğlu, the young, charismatic, and technocratic mayor of Istanbul. That İmamoğlu won the mayoralty was a blow to Erdoğan for three reasons: First was symbolic. Erdoğan was once the young, charismatic mayor of Istanbul himself. As Erdoğan’s own health has faltered—he has had health crises on live television—İmamoğlu projected youth and energy. Second was financial. Istanbul is Turkey’s largest city. The mayor controls a large budget. For decades, the AKP diverted money to its own machine and built support by offering municipal jobs to its supporters. İmamoğlu’s repeated victories cost the AKP billions of dollars. The most important reason, however, was political. İmamoğlu had demonstrated the ability to take on and defeat the Erdoğan machine, no matter how many dirty tricks in which it engaged. While Erdoğan’s promises not to run for office in 2028 was sufficient for some in Washington, DC, taking the word of a man who embezzled billions of dollars and funds U.S. designated terrorist groups is not a wise idea.

Most recently, Erdoğan’s courts have interceded to remove Özgür Özel, the elected head of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP). This would be akin to a Republican president getting to choose the head of the Democratic National Committee or a Democratic president getting to choose the Republican leadership against whom they prefer to compete. For Secretary of State Marco Rubio to speak to Fidan shortly after Özel’s ouster and, according to the State Department readout, fail to mention the judicial coup, will be interpreted in Ankara as a greenlight for further attacks on the democratic opposition.

That Erdoğan got away with three political decapitations, unfortunately, creates a playbook that other leaders now embrace. In Albania, Prime Minister Edi Rama now arrests political opponents; Albanian courts argue that they trump the constitution on issues relating to pre-trial detention. Washington silence signals to other would-be dictators that they can act on their ambitions. An absence of democratic accountability matters and left unaddressed creates a human rights death spiral.

A broader issue in Turkey is a resurgence in genocide denial and historical revisionism. Religious incitement is now at its highest in Turkey since the Armenian and Pontic Greek genocides of the early twentieth century. When U.S. Ambassador Tom Barrack referred to the genocides as an “old impression,” he encouraged Turks to double down on a history of denialism that feeds aggression and incitement. World War II-era Germany recognized its culpability in genocide allowing the country to move on. The same hold true with Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. If the international community does not force states and groups to reject racist and genocidal ideologies, they persist. When regimes cynically nurture them, the dangers grow exponentially. The October 7, 2023, Hamas pogrom against Israel occurred because the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the broader international community refused to delegitimize generational anti-Israel and antisemitic incitement.

Today, the Biafra genocide is in danger of resuming after a 56-year hiatus because the international community rehabilitated rather than stigmatized Nigerians culpable in the slaughter, including late President Muhammadu Buhari. The same holds true with Hutu génocidaires whom the UN sheltered rather than disarmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. That a new generation refers to Tutsi as cockroaches to exterminate represents a triumph of a diplomatic desire for short-term calm over the recognition of the long-term threat to international morality that ethnic and religious incitement pose.

President Joe Biden broke new diplomatic ground when he formally recognized the Armenian genocide. In addition, legislatures from all 50 states and the District of Columbia recognized the genocide. While Turkish diplomats warned and lobbied in advance against formalizing recognition of the genocide and the culpability of many of Turkey’s early leaders, their bluster was empty. This makes Trump’s reversal gratuitous and unnecessary. With Erdoğan’s rejection of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne and his growing public questions about the Montreux Convention, the importance of Washington standing with moral clarity on history only grows more important. Rather than deny history to inflate the ego and appease the denial of a dictator, U.S. officials should speak with a single voice on acknowledging the ideology of genocide and the necessity to protect and return communal property including houses of worship and schools, both Armenian and Greek. If Turkey will not allow the Greek community to appoint its own clergy without interference or arbitrary visa restriction, the United States should respond with sanctions and raise questions about recognition of Turkish stewardship and sovereignty over historic sites in Istanbul.Just as Jordan funds and appoints stewards to the Waqf in Jerusalem, so too should the United States recognize a similar mechanism for the Ecumenical Patriarchate to appoint and manage the Hagia Sophia, the monastery and church of the Zoodochos Peghe, and the Holy Theological School of Halki. Likewise, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, currently Garegin II, Catholicos of All Armenians, should resume management of Armenian Orthodox property across Turkey.

Today and like so many dictators before him, Erdoğan has found antisemitism a useful tool to divert attention and sidestep accountability from his own failures. To support Hamas over the Palestinian Authority is, by definition, to reject everything that the Palestinian Authority agreed to on paper but Hamas rejected, including a recognition of Israel’s right to exist and a foreswearing of terrorism. To argue “resistance” justifies terrorism is to greenlight suicide bombing everywhere there is a land dispute on earth which, given constant migration over millennia, would mean everywhere but Antarctica.

The rhetoric in which Erdoğan and former Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu engage toward Israel and the Jews is reminiscent of late Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser as he prepared a war of annihilation against Israel. Turkish newspapers like Yeni Şafak and Yeni Akit today parallel some of the religious hatred that was a daily feature of Der Stürmer. Turks often point to their history to suggest religious tolerance. But the 15^th century is not the 21^st century, and they are hard-pressed to give any example of tolerance from the post-Erdoğan-era.

When Muhammad Ali Jinnah founded Pakistan, he envisioned an Islamic state, but one which would still be tolerant of other religions. Pakistan recognized Christian and even Hindu celebrations and national holidays, yet today it has driven its Hindus and Sikhs out; Christians and Ahmadis fear lynchings justified by false blasphemy charges. Pakistan today reflects Turkey’s future.

The problem with incitement, as the world as seen in Gaza and the West Bank, is once unleashed, it is near impossible reverse. It is a gangrene that spreads and slowly poisons the blood of an otherwise healthy body. The damage in Turkey is now done. I do not say this lightly, but the time has come for Jews to leave Turkey, for their own life and safety. For a Jewish tourist to vacation at a resort in Antalya in 2026 would be akin to a Jewish tourist choosing Garmisch-Partenkirchen for a ski vacation in 1936. Jews in Turkey are hostages whether they realize it or not. Just as Iran has repeatedly taken Americans and Iranian-Americans hostage, Turkish officials appear on a trajectory to do likewise only with Turkish Jews or American tourists as victims. That Erdoğan believes the White House, State Department, and U.S. Embassy in Ankara would look at such provocations as episodes to bury rather than problems to rectify and reverse.

In just over a month, Erdoğan will celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 2016 coup. The Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations have accepted Erdoğan’s official narrative that adherents of one-time ally and theologian Fethullah Gülen staged the coup. That Erdoğan’s government prevents independent investigation into evidence suggests that the events of the night of July 15-16, 2016 suggests they are afraid of the truth. Increasingly, it appears the so-called coup was Turkey’s equivalent of the Reichstag Fire. Erdoğan called the coup “a gift from God” and a decade on, he uses it to justify his autocratic crackdown. Perhaps that was his goal all along.

While some Gülen followers were involved, disillusioned Turks who had nothing to do with Gülen were too, as well as some AKP partisans. Many participating soldiers had no advanced knowledge and believed they were on an exercise. This is especially true of military academy cadets. None of this excuses participants. The problem is selective persecution and unequal applicability of the law. If the standard for imprisonment is depth of relationship with Gülen, Erdoğan himself deserves a life sentence for the two worked fist-in-glove prior to their falling out over economic competition.
Among some of the most damning evidence against the core narrative of Erdoğan and his own Islamist followers is that they presented a list of alleged coup plotters so extensive that it would have been impossible to put it together in just a few hours. Rather, what they presented as a list of coup plotters appears to have been an enemies list compiled weeks or months before. Supporting this theory is the fact that some of those whom Erdoğan accused of complicity had died months earlier in Afghanistan.

Then there is the issue of an alleged Special Forces team dispatched by helicopter to arrest the vacationing Erdoğan, but this occurred five hours after Erdoğan loyalists had imposed an air ban and secured the base. An autopsy on the police officer killed in the scuffle showed he died hours before the Special Forces team arrived.

While Turkish officials say the Gulenists murdered more than 200 citizens in cold blood, eyewitnesses instead blame SADAT, a private security company led by the since-deceased General Adnan Tanriverdi, Erdoğan’s friend and military aide. That SADAT later smuggled weaponry to Hamas makes the group not only a human rights concern, but a national security one as well. On objective evidence alone, the United States should designate SADAT a foreign terrorist organization.

The Trump administration and Congress should not consider questions about the 2016 coup an “old impression” to be left in the past, because Erdoğan still uses his twisted coup narrative as a blank check to justify crackdowns, censorship, and arbitrary arrests.

I take this personally because, as with Henri Barkey, I am subject to spurious terrorism charges in Turkey and a bounty for having raised many of the questions I do here. Turkey has never provided an iota of evidence because it has none. The dossier that Erdoğan presents against his political opponents and amplifies in his state-controlled press he makes from whole cloth. In my case, state-controlled newspapers say I am a CIA agent; I am not and have never worked for that organization. They accuse me of being an Israeli. That too is false but shows the antisemitic lens and ingrained notions of dual loyalty through which Erdoğan sees the world.

I say here that, if Turkey is really the tolerant democracy its diplomats and the current U.S. ambassador to Turkey claim, I will go to Turkey to debate these issues to mark the anniversary of the coup. It would make for a good discussion, live streamed from the U.S. ambassador’s residence. Erdoğan will refuse, of course, because he realizes his narrative and defense of his own repression cannot stand up to scrutiny or fact.

Regardless, to remove the justification for Erdoğan’s crackdown is a necessary first step to end Turkey’s repression. This is Erdoğan’s biggest fear because the next president, foreign minister, and director of intelligence are likely now in prison.

The U.S. Department of State designated the Kurdistan Workers Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK) as a terrorist group in 1997 against the backdrop of a Clinton administration effort to conclude a helicopter deal with Turkey. The irony of this designation was that it came more than a decade after the PKK began its insurgency.

At the height of its insurgency, the PKK was violent. The group did not target Americans, but it did commit acts of terror against fellow Kurds and Turks as did the Turkish Army. Still, as with many other groups, the PKK evolved. The irony of U.S. demands declaring its desire to be a Syrian government that incorporates and integrates women and minorities is that it already had such an entity in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, colloquially known as Rojava. That Trump and Barrack empowered Islamists who cheered maiming and throwing Kurdish women off buildings is a shame that Washington may forget but all Syrians and Kurds will remember. Still, the reason Rojava was such a successful experiment until the U.S. betrayed it and Turkish-backed proxies invaded it is because of the PKK’s decades-long progressive evolution.

On May 12, 2025, the PKK announced it would lay down its arms and disband. I spoke to senior officials in the PKK’s orbit about their decision: They believed that what they achieved in northeastern Syria was a successful model, economically, politically, and socially. It had become their brand more than Cold War-era fighting. Perhaps naively, they believed, that if they disbanded the PKK, the Turks would lose any excuse to fight and repress the Kurds. Rather than seize an opportunity for peace, however, Erdoğan grew arrogant in a false perception of victory. More than a year on, he has failed to make any substantive offers to address the valid grievances that caused insurgency to erupt more than four decades ago.

Turkey continues to hold PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan in isolation on a prison island in the Sea of Marmara. Öcalan blessed the PKK’s dissolution. Decades of shadow negotiation between Öcalan and Turkish intelligence have made the imprisoned leader then indispensable Kurd. There can be no agreement without his buy-in, and negotiations cannot move forward so long as Öcalan remains in prison. Many Kurds see Öcalan as a new Nelson Mandela figure, a terrorist who, after long imprisonment, recognized the importance of coexistence and forgiveness. Many Turks loathe Öcalan for the insurgency the PKK once waged, but peace requires moving on and a truth and reconciliation process. There will never be peace and security in Turkey until Turks isolated in their own nationalist bubble and indoctrinated by a nationalist but inaccurate curriculum hear the experiences of many other Turkish citizens who hail from Kurdish backgrounds.

The United States can advance peace and cement its role as mediator if it were to delist the PKK as a terror organization to allow the PKK’s thinkers to travel to Washington from Iraq, Syria, France, and Belgium where they now sit. Erdoğan may complain, but neither human rights nor U.S. national interests require assuaging aging dictators.

Every democrat wakes up and knows when his or her term in office ends; every dictator must recognize that today could be his last. This breeds paranoia and a quest for scapegoats and deflection. In Turkey, Erdoğan had blamed Kurds, Jews, Gülenists, liberals, and Americans.
By almost every metric, Turkey’s human rights situation has declined precipitously. In 2010, Freedom House ranked Turkey as “partly free,” putting it on par with Albania and Bosnia and in the top third of countries ranked. Today, Freedom House ranks Turkey in the bottom third, below China-occupied Hong Kong and Russia-occupied Abkhazia. The same pattern plays out in Transparency Internationals’ 2010 perception of corruption index, Turkey ranked 56 out of 178; in 2025, it had fallen to 124 out of 182, putting it on the verge of falling behind even Iraq. According to Reporters Without Borders, Turkey has now fallen behind both Iraq and Cuba in press freedom. Sycophancy to a dictatorship more repressive to the press than even Cuba is a bad look for any U.S. ambassador let alone a U.S. president.

Nor are these metrics the only problem. In 2025, Pew Research Center has again ranked Turkey as among the world’s most anti-American countries. This anti-Americanism is no coincidence, but rather the result of a steady stream of vitriol and conspiracy in which Erdoğan and his top advisors take refuge. The U.S. approach to Turkey across both Democratic and Republic administrations has erred. When diplomacy confuses flattery with substance, dictators consolidate control. When those dictators are ideologically averse to Western liberalism and tolerance, such sycophancy neither brings friendship nor trust from hostile governments. Turkish liberals, meanwhile, feel betrayal when they hear U.S. leaders and diplomats praising their tormenter.

Many American universities and think tanks have also diminished themselves with their approach to Turkey. In 1995, a controversy erupted surrounding Princeton University when Heath Lowry, the Atatürk Chair of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies, accidentally sent a letter to a genocide scholar he had earlier drafted on the letterhead of Turkey’s ambassador to the United States, showing that he was acting as an unregistered foreign agent to further Turkey’s genocide denial. Controversy swirled around Princeton’s employment of Lowry and whether the American university was trading its silence and platform for the goodwill of donor nations.² That Princeton University subsequently repeated its silence in the face of detained graduate students in Iran suggests that, 30 years on, certain institutions have failed to reform.³

The same pay-to-play applies to think tanks. Many prominent scholarly institutions in Washington, DC, take funds from Turkey. Some seek to split hairs by arguing that they do not take funds from governments, but they openly do so from corporate entities owned by or close to Turkish officials. This, then, becomes a distinction without a difference and the think tank equivalent of money laundering.

Other think tanks insist they take no foreign assistance, but they appear to then trade supporter access to top leaders including Erdoğan for donations. Still other scholars as well as many other journalists on an individual level self-censor to preserve their own access. Istanbul and Ankara-based correspondents have said privately they are warned that to quote blacklisted critics will mean an end to their own access to Turkish government officials. Frankly, this is the same strategy the People’s Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran imposed on American university and think tank scholars. The result is the same: distorted analysis and apologia obfuscating growing human rights crises. For U.S. diplomats and policymakers to rely on this limited number of scholars with access is to fall into an echo chamber.

That conservative think tanks increasingly prioritize military analysis over human rights advocacy is short-sighted and undermines the broader freedom movement.

Certain policy circles may find it fashionable to dismiss Turkey’s dismal human rights scene as outside the parameters of U.S. interests, but this is naïve. Dictatorships never last; they always collapse into chaos. Support for extremism abroad always leads to blowback at home. Incitement only brings generational conflict.

Diplomacy should never be about amplifying foreign narratives; rather, the strongest U.S. foreign policies are those that are bipartisan and calibrated to reality rather than spin. Turkey is a growing problem. Ignoring it will lead to internal instability if not regional conflict or war.

But if the United States acts proactively to support a human rights policy in Turkey that promotes transparency, press freedom, minority rights, and historical accountability, a better future is possible for all Turks and the broader region. Simply put, there will never be peace in the Eastern Mediterranean or Southern Caucasus until Turkey is at peace with all its citizens and its leaders learn that a strong Turkey is based on rule-of-law and transparency, not distraction and conspiracy.

Thank you for the opportunity to testify.

¹ Michael Rubin, “Human Rights in Turkey Today,” Testimony submitted to the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, June 10, 2025, https://humanrightscommission.house.gov/events/hearings/human-rights-turkey-today-0

² William H. Honan, “Princeton is Accused of Fronting for the Turkish Government,” New York Times, May 22, 1996, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/22/nyregion/princeton-is-accused-of-fronting-for-the-turkish-government.html

³ Michael Rubin, “Silence is never the answer when hostages are taken,” Washington Examiner, September 10, 2023, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2445048/silence-is-never-the-answer-when-hostages-are-taken/