On Monday WikiLeaks announced it would release a tranche of “internal emails” from the Turkish government.

The following day the group published what it calls the Erdoğan Emails, a searchable database of 294,548 emails said to have been leaked from the AKP, Turkey’s ruling political party.

Coming Tuesday: The #ErdoganEmails: 300 thousand internal emails from Erdoğan’s AKP – through to July 7, 2016. pic.twitter.com/QGHEc7eCPB — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) July 18, 2016

“The material was obtained a week before the attempted coup. However, WikiLeaks has moved forward its publication schedule in response to the government’s post-coup purges,” notes WikiLeaks. “We have verified the material and the source, who is not connected, in any way, to the elements behind the attempted coup, or to a rival political party or state.”

Characterizing the data dump as the “Erdoğan Emails” is a stretch, according to Emre Kızılkaya, digital news coordinator for the leading Turkish daily Hürriyet. Kızılkaya says the vast majority of emails are from Turkish citizens, not AKP officials.

Only 0.2% of Turkish emails leaked by @wikileaks are sent from AKP accounts. The rest is sent to AKP from ordinary citizens. — Emre KIZILKAYA (@ekizilkaya) July 20, 2016

The emails reveal Turkey as a classic police state.

The country is similar to East Germany under the rule of the communists. Thousands of ordinary Turks act as informants, ratting each other out to the government, according to Kızılkaya.

Only interesting fact from @wikileaks: Many Turks inform on each other. They file complaints that a certain citizen is critical of the gov’t — Emre KIZILKAYA (@ekizilkaya) July 20, 2016

In East Germany, the vast majority of informants “were totally normal citizens… who betrayed others: neighbors reporting on neighbors, schoolchildren informing on classmates, university students passing along information on other students, managers spying on employees and Communist bosses denouncing party members.”

Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, fascist Italy, Cuba, North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, and other socialist totalitarian states used citizen informants to eliminate dissidents.

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