Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan an has filed a complaint against leading Dutch politician Geert Wilders for posting a cartoon of him on Twitter, Turkish state news agency Anadolu reported.
Erdogan’s lawyer Huseyin Aydin filed a criminal complaint to the Ankara prosecutor’s office for “insulting the president,” a punishable under Turkish law.
“Suspect Wilders, in his content targeting our first [directly] elected [by public] president, used expressions insulting the honour and dignity of our president, and committed the crime publicly by targeting his personality, dignity and reputation,” state-run Anadolu news agency quoted the complaint as saying on Tuesday.
On Saturday (24 October), Wilders shared a cartoon picture of Erdogan wearing a bomb-resembling hat on his head with the caption “terrorist”.
On Monday (Oct 26), he posted an image of a sinking ship with a Turkish flag on it. “Bye bye @RTErdogan. Kick Turkey out of NATO,” he said under the photo.
Erdogan already hit back at Wilders over the cartoon this weekend, saying: “There is this so-called Dutch deputy who speaks ill of us. Unlike him, we don’t condone racism, and fascists have no place in Turkey.”
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavu?o?lu also condemned the cartoon, saying that “the racist losers of Europe have shown their true colours when faced with reality.”
Turkey’s pro-government mouthpiece Daily Sabah published a front-page editorial on Monday calling Wilders and Macron “the two faces of hatred, racism in Europe”.
Wilders , who is the Leader of the Party for Freedom that he founded it in 2006, also served as the parliamentary leader of his party in the House of Representatives.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte called Ankara’s move against Wilders unacceptable and said his government would raise the issue with Turkey.
“In the Netherlands, we consider freedom of expression as the highest good. And cartoons are part of that, including cartoons of politicians,” Rutte told reporters.
Wilders has often advocated that the values of liberal democracy are inherently in conflict with those of Islam and immigrants from majority-Muslim nations.
Wilders has called for banning the Quran, taxing the hijab, shutting down all mosques, sealing off Dutch borders to Muslim migrants and withdrawal of Netherlands out of the European Union.
