And this year, our prayers will include special emphasis on the health care workers, emergency workers and other essential employees who are on the f… - Fethullah Gülen

As a matter of fact, the institutions that the Turkish Government closed down by declaring the Hizmet movement a terrorist organization as a political decision are schools, hospitals and humanitarian aid associations. The Hizmet volunteers, tens of thousands of whom have been detained and arrested, are teachers, entrepreneurs, doctors, academics or journalists. No evidence has been found to accuse these hundreds of thousands of witch hunt victims of either supporting the coup or any act of violence.

The next day, the government produced lists of thousands of individuals whom they tied to Hizmet — for opening a bank account, teaching at a school or reporting for a newspaper — and treated such an affiliation as a crime and began destroying their lives. The lists included people who had been dead for months and people who had been serving at NATO’s European headquarters at the time. International watchdogs have reported numerous abductions, in addition to torture and deaths in detention. The government pursued innocent people outside Turkey, pressuring Malaysia, for instance, to deport three Hizmet sympathizers last week, including a school principal who has lived there for more than a decade, to face certain imprisonment and likely torture.

Turkey's salvation lies in the deepening of democratic culture and the internalization of a merit-based state administration. Neither a military coup nor an autocratic civilian administration is the solution.