Before Daily Academic Freedom was a blog, it was a hashtag (#dailyacademicfreedom) that I used to tweet out information and calls to action from Scholars at Risk about scholars around the world who were facing detention or trial (or worse) by their governments. Unsurprisingly, among these were a number of Turkish scholars.
As is well known, in January of 2016, over 2000 Turkish scholars signed a petition criticizing the Turkish government’s treatment of the Kurdish minority in southeastern Turkey. Now, almost two and a half years later, many of the signatories have been subject to termination of employment or prosecution.
The Turkish government’s trampling of academic freedom has resulted in a burgeoning scholarly literature on academic freedom in the Turkish context. Herewith, are three abstracts for articles within this literature that anyone interested in academic freedom should make time to read.
Abstract: In January 2016, 1128 predominantly Turkish intellectuals signed an Academics for Peace petition to draw attention to the conflict in southeastern Turkey. Their actions were met with outcry from the government, accusing the signatories of disloyalty to the state, even treason. This paper is an analysis of the responses of 60 of these scholars to a questionnaire sent to the entire Academics for Peace email list. Respondents, including 58 signatories, provided various perspectives on academic freedom in Turkey, as well as their own experiences of signing the petition. We contend that the responses faced by these intellectuals illustrate the homogenizing effects of power to silence criticism and ensure loyalty to the government and its ideas of Turkishness. It reflects a continuation of the suppression of academic freedom in Turkey, an issue that sees little sign of abatement or reform in the light of present challenges.
Abstract: On 11 January 2016, 1128 academics in Turkey and abroad signed a petition calling on Turkish authorities to cease state violence in mainly Kurdish populated areas of the country, which had been under curfew and an extended state of emergency. The petition received an immediate reaction from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who accused the signatories of treason and terrorist propaganda. He subsequently demanded that public prosecuters launch an investigation. Criminalisation of the petition has been exacerbated by disciplinary action by universities against many of the signatories. Many have suffered insults, arrest, detention or suspension as a result of the ensuing smear campaign. This massive crackdown on academic freedom has been masked by discourses of counterterrorism, which have also been deployed to criminalise dissent more generally in Turkey as a part of a process of rapid “democratic retrenchment” since 2013. This article is an attempt to put the criminalisation of academics within the larger framework of human rights violations, increasing curtailments of academic freedom and rising authoritarianism in Turkey. It argues that the prosecution of the signatories of the petition is an extension of an established tradition of targeting academic freedom in times of political crisis in Turkey but is also a product of growing authoritarianism under the ruling party and President Erdoğan. It shows that counterterrorism laws can be extended far beyond eliminating security threats by instrumentalising them to suppress dissent in a declining democracy.
Abstract: Mehmet Fatih Traş was one of the 1128 original signatories of the declaration ‘We will not be a party to this crime’, made public on 11 January 2016. Accusing the Turkish state of violating its own laws and various international treaties to which Turkey is a party in its war against the PKK, the declaration made a plea for peace. The declaration triggered an immediate and furious response from government circles. In his address to a group of foreign emissaries on 12 January 2016, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the President of the Republic, lashed out at the signatories: ‘There is this bunch, they call themselves academics, vilifying their own state which tries to protect its territories against a terrorist organization.’ Kurdish citizens of Turkey had no problems whatsoever, according to the President: ‘These so-called academics talk about the massacres of the state. You, pseudo-intellectuals, you are ignorant, you represent the darkness … You are either with the state or with terrorists, terrorist organizations’. It has not taken long for the Higher Education Council (YÖK, 2017), a body, though set up by the military junta that carried out the September 1980 coup, which describes itself as ‘an autonomous institution which is responsible for the planning, coordination and governance of higher education system in Turkey in accordance with the Turkish Constitution and the Higher Education Laws’, to release a written statement to the effect that ‘the declaration which supports terrorism cannot be defended as academic freedom’ and that necessary legal action will be taken ‘to safeguard the security of our citizens’. This is followed by a number of disciplinary investigations against the signatories which has led to the suspension and/or dismissal of some of the signatories, and even detentions as in the case of Esra Mungan, Muzaffer Kaya, Kıvanç Ersoy, and Meral Camcı who were released after several weeks in prison pending trial (Altıparmak & Akdeniz, 2017, pp. 14-15).
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