Blog by Gülden Özcan
As immigrant/international students/scholars we often find ourselves living in-between two countries, which, to be sure, has its advantages and disadvantages. Among others we have the benefits of comparative perspective and international representation. Among many hardships we often find ourselves stuck in limbo—we live neither here nor there. It is certainly difficult to live away from family and life-long friends during significant personal/familial life events, yet I increasingly find it even more discomforting to be abroad during the times of significant social and political turmoil our ‘home’ countries going through. It is not a type of patriotism defined in terms of nationalist ideology. Yet, it still has a lot to do with social (and thus personal) history, with being away from those with whom you share a certain collective memory while they are suffering. It is primarily such discomfort that triggers intellectual responsibility to read, write and get involved in political activism. On the other hand, being an immigrant/international student/scholar puts us in a position of ‘native correspondents’ to report on our ‘home’ countries in the eyes of others—even though our primary academic research interests do not focus on the politics of our ‘home’ country.
With these thoughts in mind I write this blog post primarily to bring attention to the line of events taking place in Turkey, in general, and oppressions over academics and fellow graduate students, in particular. In doing so, I aim to emphasize that the rights violations over freedom of speech are not peculiar to Turkey and that the incidents I quoted here should stand as reminders of the fragility of our ‘taken-for-granted’ rights and freedoms.
Last year, on January 11, 2016, a peace declaration was released to the press in Turkey. 1,128 academics signed the declaration entitled “We will not be a party to this crime!” referring to the atrocities conducted by the state security forces towards civilians in the Kurdish provinces of the country.
Photo: Signatory academics gathered at the press release of the peace declaration on January 11, 2016. (Source: Bianet)
The Turkish state’s unending war towards its citizens with Kurdish origin escalated after the electoral success of the pro-Kurdish political party, Halkların Demokratik Partisi (Peoples’ Democratic Party, HDP) in the general elections on June 7, 2015. As the ruling political party, Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party, AKP), lost its parliamentary majority in the elections for the first time since 2002, HDP got 13% of the votes and gained 80 seats out of 550 in the parliament. Given that the electoral threshold for a political party to enter the parliament is 10% and that the very reason for the threshold was to prevent the Kurdish political movement from entering the parliament, this was a huge success for HDP.
It was a result of multi-layered historical, sociological and political dynamics at the time. Yet mostly it was a result of the atmosphere created by the so-called ‘peace process’ that was initiated by the AKP government in roughly 2009 between the state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK—an outlawed armed organization that continues its activities since 1982). The peace process did not end the conflict between the two forces. Yet it marked an historic period where the ‘Kurdish question’ could be discussed with relatively less limitations on people’s freedom of speech. For example, when one refers to the imprisoned leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan (in solitary confinement since 1999), she would not be forced to precede with the ‘head terrorist’ or the ‘baby killer’ on TV and could simply state ‘Mr. Öcalan.’ Or the atrocities Kurds in Turkey faced could be subject of discussions on TV and other media channels insofar as they referred to the atrocities that took place preceding the AKP governments. This was the extent to which one could speak of ‘relatively less limitations on freedom of speech’ regarding the Kurdish issue while age-long discrimination and oppression towards Kurds persisted at different levels across the country.
This was the atmosphere in which HDP—as a pro-Kurdish party including non-Kurdish members and parliamentary candidates from marginalized communities, socialists, feminists, non-Turkish and non-Muslim minorities, defending women’s rights, LGBTI rights, truth and reconciliation process, peace and radical democracy—conducted their election campaign by giving voice to the aspirations of marginalized peoples from all walks of life for a true democratization and peace process in the country.
Photo: Co-presidents of the HDP, Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, right after the election results were announced on June 7, 2015. Poster behind reads "People to the Parliament," and "The Great Humanity." Both co-presidents are in prison since November 3, 2016 (Source: Birgün Daily)
HDP’s electoral success precipitated the end of the parliamentary majority for the ruling AKP that was enjoying majority government since 2002. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, former prime minister and leader of the AKP, acted fast to call for a re-election to take place on November 1, 2015 with no legitimate reason. Erdoğan himself along with the mainstream media initiated a hostile campaign towards the HDP, its elected MPs, and its supporters. The tools to do so were readily available at hand from the decades of armed conflict and fabricated hatred towards Kurds among the masses whose economic deprivation was being supplanted with religious conservatism and ultra-nationalism. In five months between June 7 and November 1, 2015, there were suicide bombings blamed on ISIS, targeting HDP meetings and supporters killing nearly 400 civilians. In the deadliest attack on October 10, 2015, 107 people were killed and over 500 wounded in front of the main train station in Ankara, the capital city, where the crowd had gathered for the ‘Peace and Democracy’ demonstration called by HDP, trade unions, occupational associations, and other civil societal organizations.
Photo: In front of the main train station right after the Ankara massacre, killing 107 people who were among thousands gathered for the 'Peace and Democracy' demonstration on October 10, 2015. The placard on the windshield reads "Peace, Now!" (Source: Associated Press)
In this five-month period, attacks to the HDP offices and ordinary Kurds were normalized again and the country was “restored to factory settings” regarding the Kurdish issue as one Facebook user summarized. On September 4, 2015 the Turkish military forces commenced a military operation in the Kurdish town of Cizre. They announced a state of emergency in the town and banned people from going into the streets. The town witnessed harsh clashes leaving over 30 civilians dead. Cizre was the most blatant example of government’s undermining of basic human rights in Kurdish towns; the clashes escalated in other Kurdish cities, Sur, Silvan, Nusaybin, Silopi and others while the election campaign for the re-election was still ongoing. The Kurdish population was threatened by the AKP leaders as they were told during the re-election campaign that if they didn’t vote for the AKP, they would return to the 1990s—a period marked by violent conflict between the PKK and state armed forces, as well as extrajudicial killings and forced displacement of Kurdish population from their villages. As a result, the AKP not only regained its majority government in the November 1, 2015 election, but also it strengthened the victory of ultra-nationalism over the demand for peace and democracy as both parties of opposition in the parliament excluding the HDP backed up the AKP actions towards Kurds.
This was the political climate in January 2016 in Turkey: as the HDP was silenced through the mainstream media channels’ unnamed boycott, no opposition was being heard regarding the atrocities taking place in the Kurdish provinces of the country. Civilians were being killed, left without food, water and electricity under the curfew. Academics for Peace was formed by a group of academics in November 2012 with the aim of building peace in the country by contributing to knowledge production on subjects including but not limited to Kurdish question, peace processes in the world, deliberation and solution processes in similar conflicts, the role of women in peace processes in general, and the integration of first languages in education systems along with official languages.
Photo: Military vehicles move in a deserted street of Silvan, Turkey, during a curfew following clashes between Turkish forces and Kurdish militants on November 10, 2015. © Ilyas Akengin / AFP
In the face of concerning developments explained above, Academics for Peace drafted a peace declaration to call on government to end the violence in Kurdish provinces immediately and resume the peace process that was initiated in 2013. The declaration quickly gathered 1,128 signatures from academics of diverse disciplines across the country. After its release to the press on January 11, an intense campaign of intimidation towards the signatories was started as President Erdoğan marked the academics as ‘traitors’ and blamed them of being supporters of terrorism. Yet, despite the defamation and harassment of signatories, the declaration received over 1,000 additional signatures and by the end of January 2016 the declaration was signed by a total of 2,212 academics mostly residing in Turkey.
Since then, the signatories faced arbitrary rights violations with an extraordinary range and degree of repression: some of violations include disciplinary investigations, police interrogations, detentions and imprisonment, threats, mobbing, intimidation, bans on leaving the country, dismissals, suspensions from duty, and cuts to their research funding. After the failed coup attempt on July 15, 2016, the persecution of the signatories of the peace declaration intensified as the authorities used the cover of purge against the coup plotters to engage in extralegal actions against the signatories, especially against Kurdish, unionized, and left-wing academics and educators. The state of emergency announced after July 15 and continued since then was extended for another three-month period as of January 19, 2017. Under the state of emergency conditions rights violations have been relentlessly put into practice. Not only academics, but also journalists (one third of all arrested journalists globally are in Turkey), writers, public figures, MPs of the HDP, and ordinary people are being arrested based on trivial reasons, most commonly based on their social media posts and simple disagreements with government policies. As I am writing this blog post a new decree law that has dismissed 42 signatories of the peace declaration from their universities is declared by the government on January 6.(See updated list of rights violations towards signatories here).
Photo: Sabahat Tuncel, former MP from the HDP, while being taken under custody during the protest of the arrests of HDP co-presidents on November 4, 2016.
January last year marked a new turn in the country’s dark history while first hours of January this year hit a new low with the night club attack! While last year’s attempt aimed at undermining the value of academic freedoms, this year’s attack (claimed by ISIS) occurred against the backdrop of the government’s one-month-long campaign vilifying the new year celebrations, coining them as anti-Islamic). January 2017 attack portends another wave of instability as it has targeted the life style of relatively safer and non-oppositional upper-class people in the country.
Turkey has never been a safe heaven for freedom of speech or academic freedoms. The political history of modern Turkey is a history of military coup d’états, curfews, states of emergency, and purges towards opposition. To give an example of the extent of the irony, Pınar Selek, an anti-militarist feminist sociologist, writer of the most exhaustive history of the peace movement in the country, has been prosecuted for over fifteen years based on fabricated evidence in connection to an explosion that occurred in Istanbul in 1998. She has been tried and acquitted of all charges three times (in 2006, 2008, and 2011), yet again in 2013 she was sentenced to life-time prison. Similarly ironic is the fact that the signatory academics of the peace declaration drafted by Academics for Peace are being investigated based on terrorism charges. As renowned novelist Aslı Erdoğan, who was under pre-trial detention for five months from August to late December 2016 with no evidence other than being on the ‘never-consulted’ advisory board of the pro-Kurdish daily Özgür Gündem, succinctly expressed in her defense, “Turkey has so far detained and arrested over one hundred and fifty authors […in other words], the country cuts its own tongue with an incomprehensible grudge.”
Photo: Margaret Atwood (left) and Aslı Erdoğan (right). Atwood wrote a letter of support to jailed novelist Aslı Erdoğan.
As Margaret Atwood remarked in her letter to Aslı Erdoğan: “Writers are the conscience-keepers of society; they must remain free—their place is not in prison, but with pen and paper, with typewriters, with their keyboards. And on this day, every year, the entire PEN community says in one voice that we will continue to fight for freedom for any writer, anywhere in the world, who is prevented from doing his or her work.”
To be sure, the rights violations over freedom of thought and expression are not peculiar to Turkey. These incidents are reminders that the democratic rights and freedoms we inherited from the previous generations as a result of their struggles in the history of modern capitalist world order can never be taken for granted. The struggles for our rights and freedoms have to be perpetual as the capital accumulation with its imperialist tendencies depends on the violations of such rights and freedoms. We are witnessing a similar backlash, although certainly not to the same degree, here in Canada, and more obviously in the US and Europe, too—not to mention countries of Global South. As the answer to the current crisis of capitalism becomes the ever more forceful imposition of neoliberalism, we see a proliferation of authoritarian tendencies and regimes. Thus, the democratic rights and freedoms we enjoy are the first to be sacrificed if we don’t make it a perpetual struggle to defend them. As a matter of fact, the escalating oppression in Turkey is not developing independently of the current global conjuncture: this crisis of capital accumulation, the war economy in the region, and the attendant refugee flows are all part and parcel of the drift towards authoritarianism.
The only way to fight back against such oppression is to build and raise the international support and solidarity networks. Resistance should be as global as capital is. How to build solidarity with Academics for Peace? Some suggestions compiled by Chad Kautzer can be found here. In addition, each institution and/or department can use their own sources to create temporary or permanent space for those graduate students and faculty members who are under risk.