MHP leader criticizes social media posts asking help against fire

ANKARA

Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) leader Devlet Bahçeli on Aug. 3 criticized social media posts asking for help from the world against wildfires across Turkey.

“Calls to foreign countries and the intense demand for help by some abhorrent and cursed social media accounts due to the forest fires should be considered as the cryptic message of the insidiousness to show Turkey as a helpless and needy country,” he said in a written statement.

The “perpetrators” of these fires will be exposed sooner or later, he said.

“Of course, how our forests were set on fire, and the identity and belonging of the arsonists will soon become much clearer,” Bahçeli stated.

In the period of disasters, keeping solidarity and cooperation alive and resisting disasters with common sense and a good-hearted attitude are of indescribable importance, the MHP leader said.

The Turkish nation is one and together in pain, he said and expressed criticism against politicians that were critical of firefighting management.

“It is regrettable that the opportunists, who are on their guard to turn forest fires into political profit and who look for an environment to exploit today’s fragile and delicate environment of our country, are caught in a deep vortex of negligence and irresponsibility,” Bahçeli stated.

The statements of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and İYİ (Good) Party are too “shameful and sickly to be compatible with neither the love of the country, the nation, nor political ethics and virtue,” he stated.

He accused these political parties of “cowardly entering” into the competition to benefit from the fire in Turkey’s difficult days and noted that this understanding is “despicable and ungrateful.”

It is an “unreasonable and immoral fabrication” to claim that forest areas in tourism cities were burned to make buildings and that amendments were made to the Tourism Incentive Law at the parliament for this purpose, Bahçeli stated.

He argued that “it is aimed to weaken the social resilience and weaken the social and economic resilience of Turkey by putting the country into a planned chaos process.”