23 May 2018 | Egypt, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”100519″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]Prosecutors have ordered Egyptian activist Amal Fathy to remain in detention for 15 days on charges of “inciting against the state, using social media to spread fake news and defaming Egypt.”
On 11 May the 33 year-old pro-democracy online activist was arrested alongside her husband Mohamed Lotfy, founder and executive director of the 2018 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award- winning Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, an Egyptian rights watchdog, in a pre-dawn raid on the couple’s home.
The arrests came two days after Fathy, a third-year Mass Communication student at Cairo University and a former actress and model, posted a video lambasting the government for its failure to end sexual harassment, which remains widespread despite a 2014 law that criminalises the behaviour. In the 11-minute clip posted on her Facebook page, Fathy also criticised Egyptian authorities for “the deteriorating socio-economic conditions and public services in the country”.
While her husband was released after three hours, Fathy was ordered held and remains in custody pending investigations by State Security Prosecutors in case no. 261 of 2018 in which several other young pro-reform activists face a host of accusations including “joining an outlawed group to disrupt state institutions, spread fake news and undermine trust in the Egyptian state.”
The crackdown continues to gather pace. This morning, 23 May 2018, human rights activist and blogger Wael Abbas was arrested at dawn from his home in Cairo, according to a post he made on Facebook.
Shadi Ghazali Harb, a prominent leader of the 2011 uprising that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, is another government critic that has been arrested in the case. He was summoned by prosecutors on 15 May for investigation on charges of insulting president Abdel Fattah El Sisi and spreading false news in relation to tweets he had posted criticising the government over recent increases in metro fares.
“At a time when people don’t know how they’ll cope with the next wave of price hikes that started with the metro fares, Sisi is inspecting the new administrative capital and is racing against time to build a wall to isolate himself and his cronies from the people. Can he actually finish it before the next eruption of mass protests?” Harb tweeted on 11 May.
Days earlier, comedian Shady Abu Zaid, who produces an online satirical show called The Rich Content, was arrested at his home and was forcibly disappeared for 24 hours before resurfacing at State Security Headquarters. Abu Zaid has a large following on social media networks since posting a prank-video two years ago that showed him distributing condom-balloons among security forces in Tahrir Square on the anniversary of the January 25 uprising. He too faces charges of joining an outlawed group and disseminating fake news, according to his lawyer Azza Soliman. Analysts say the incarceration of the young activists “signals a new wave of repression targeting Egypt’s youth revolutionaries with the aim of intimidating and silencing dissenters.”
Fathy’s video drew mixed reactions in Egypt meanwhile, with security sources and pro-government media accusing her of “insulting Egypt” and “inciting against the state”. State-run media outlets which have slipped back into their old habit of serving as government propaganda mouthpieces, identified her as a member of the April 6 Movement, the youth group that mobilised protesters ahead of the 2011 uprising that toppled Mubarak. The group has been persistently vilified by the pro-government media with several TV talk show hosts branding its members as “traitors” and “foreign agents” after the movement was outlawed by court order in April 2014.
Egyptian and international rights groups however, have denounced Fathy’s detention with Amnesty International calling the move “a new low in Egypt’s crackdown on freedom of expression.” Nine Egyptian rights groups have signed an online petition published by the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies on 14 May, describing Fathy’s detention as “state retribution for exercising her right to free speech” and calling for the activist’s immediate release.
The Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms which signed the petition, said it was the actual target of Fathy’s arrest as the organisation has “continuously suffered persecution at the hands of Egyptian security agencies,” and its management has “frequently been the target of state harassment,” ECRF said in a statement published on its Facebook page on 12 May, a day after Fathy’s arrest.
The ECRF’s Giza office was raided by security officers in plainclothes in October 2016 ; the men searched the office without presenting a search warrant and threatened to close it down. Lotfy, who previously worked as a researcher for Amnesty International before founding the ECRF, was banned from travelling in June 2015 and had his passport confiscated. The rights watchdog works on documenting cases that are particularly touchy for the government such as enforced disappearances and torture in prisons. [/vc_column_text][vc_separator][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”99421″ img_size=”full” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2018/04/campaigning-fellow-2018/”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_custom_heading text=”Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms” font_container=”tag:p|font_size:24|text_align:left” use_theme_fonts=”yes” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2F2018%2F04%2Fcampaigning-fellow-2018%2F|||”][vc_column_text]ECRF is one of the few human rights organisations still operating in a country which has waged an orchestrated campaign against independent civil society groups. Find out more about the 2018 Freedom of Expression Awards Campaigning Fellow.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_separator][vc_column_text]The government’s malpractices have become so rampant under the Sisi regime that they were described in a September 2017 Human Rights Watch report as “an epidemic of abuses.” The in-depth report sparked government outrage after it alleged that President Sisi had given national security officers the green light to use to use torture with impunity—a charge that has been vehemently denied by Egyptian government officials. Basing its findings on research by Egyptian rights groups including documentation of rights violations in Egyptian prisons by ECRF lawyers, the report cited such techniques as an “assembly line” of beatings, electric shocks, stress positions and sometimes rape by security forces that HRW said “could amount to crimes against humanity.” In a similar damning report published by the ECRF some months earlier, the organisation claimed it had received 830 complaints in 2016 with torture being practised to force suspects to confess or divulge information. It also said it had documented nearly 400 cases of enforced disappearances between August 2016 and the same month in 2017.
The fact that ECRF’s lawyers are also acting as legal consultants for Guilio Regeni’s family has only served to further provoke the ire of the Egyptian authorities. The case of the slain Italian researcher who went missing in Cairo before his badly-mutilated corpse was found in a ditch on the outskirts of Cairo in February 2015 has embarrassed the government in Cairo, causing a rift between Egypt and Italy and prompting the latter to recall its ambassador. This, after investigations revealed that the Cambridge post-graguate student who had been researching the country’s independent trade unions—a topic of great sensitivity for the government—had been tortured before his death.
Rights lawyer Ibrahim Metwally, who was helping investigate Regeni’s murder and had been monitoring enforced disappearances , has been held behind bars since September 2017 in reportedly “appalling conditions” after he himself was forcibly disappeared for three days.
Since 2014, Egyptian human rights defenders have borne the brunt of a brutal government crackdown on peaceful dissent. Their suffering has been made all the worse by the passing of a 2017 NGO law, slammed as “draconian” and “restrictive” by international rights groups. Dozens of rights groups face prosecution in the so-called “NGO foreign funding case,” reopened by the authorities in March 2016, on charges of “receiving foreign funding to sow chaos.” Several rights organisations have had their assets frozen and have had travel bans imposed on their directors and staffers. ECRF is no exception. One of the last few remaining independent rights organizations still operating in the country –despite the restrictive environment — the ECRF was the recipient of the 2018 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Campaigning Award. Despite the recognition, its staffers remain under threat. The organisation sees Fathy’s arrest as setting a new “precedent in the practices used by security agencies to hamper the work of human rights organizations.”
It also perceives Fathy’s prosecution as “a warning message” ahead of a planned visit to Cairo next week by Italian prosecutors to review video footage captured by security cameras in the metro station where Regeni disappeared on January 25, 2016.
“It is shameful that this is how the security authorities choose to deal with ECRF one week before the Italian technical visit to Egypt ,” ECRF wrote in the 12 May statement posted on its Facebook page.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]24/5/2018: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to a September 2019 Human Rights Watch report. The report dates from September 2017.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1527174085953-a3c45a99-4868-10″ taxonomies=”24135″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
22 May 2018 | News and features, Turkey
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”81952″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]While the scale of Turkey’s crackdown on freedom of expression in the post-coup-attempt emergency rule era has been intense, the assault on dissenting voices predated the failed putsch.
Whether it they were Kurdish writers at the turn of the decade, or worked for Feza Publications just months before the night elements of the military betrayed their fellow Turks, journalists that offered alternative viewpoints were long in president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s crosshairs.
In the case of Feza’s popular publications — among them Zaman and the English-language Zaman Daily — which had been raided and its employees arrested on several occasions since 2014 as the shakey rule of law eroded in Turkey. In a March 2016 move that was condemned internationally, Feza Publications was targeted with the imposition of government-appointed trustees. This resulted in the termination of hundreds of media professionals from journalists to advertising reps and the literally overnight change from independent and critical outlets to government propaganda sheets.
An appeal on the takeover of Feza was made to the European Court of Human Rights to address a clear violation of the right to freedom of expression, among others. Yet the application was rejected on what was seen as questionable grounds, becoming one of the many disappointing decisions taken by the international court.
Takeover
The assault on Feza Publications was ordered by the Istanbul 6th Criminal Court of the Peace on Friday 4 March 2016. By nightfall, the police had raided the Zaman newspaper office, using tear gas and water cannons on the protestors outside. The Saturday edition of Zaman was the last version of a free newspaper. The front page headline declared “the constitution suspended” and noted that Turkish press had seen one of its “darkest days”. The Sunday edition, under new ownership, was a disconcerting contrast. The front page showed a smiling president Erdogan holding hands with an elderly woman, coupled with an announcement that was he hosting a Women’s Day event. The main headline was “Historic excitement about the bridge”, a reference to a span being built across the Bosphorus with state funding.
Newly appointed government trustees immediately interfered with editorial decisions. A staff member commented that: “Before the takeover, our deadline was 7:30pm. The trustees moved that deadline to 4:30pm, and in the remaining three hours they censored and changed the paper to fit their new ‘line’.” The new management had also banned staff access to the newspapers’ archives.
The police who had raided the office on the Friday, stayed on to check staff IDs and prevent groups of three or more from assembling. Hundreds of Feza Publications employees were then dismissed under Article 25 of the Turkish labour law which lays out that contracts can be annulled without prior notice if an employee displays “immoral, dishonourable or malicious conduct”. Those dismissed have recounted how they received a generic letter which gave no explanation the accusations.
Considered enemies of the state, former Feza Publications employees found it difficult to obtain new jobs. They were left to survive on little to no income; Article 25 outlines that those dismissed are not eligible for redundancy packages or other compensation And recruiters were right to be weary; four-and-a-half months after the takeover, the July 16th coup attempt occurred, and purges began on a massive scale. Thousands of journalists were dismissed, and dozens were detained on terrorism-related charges. Feza Publications, already marked as Gulen-linked and thus terrorist – without the presumption of innocence – during the takeover, was a prime target. Thirty-one Zaman employees are currently standing trial, with nine, including Şahin Alpay, facing life sentences. In January 2018, Turkey’s constitutional court ordered that Şahin Alpay, alongside journalist Mehmet Altan, be released from pre-trial detention.
After the lower courts refused to comply, the ECtHR ruled that their detention was unlawful and that they should each be compensated €21,500.
The other journalists, unable to garner the same international support, have remained in pre-trial detention. Zaman’s Ankara chief Mustafa Ünal, arrested purely because of his newspaper columns and facing the same circumstances as Alpay, has also applied to the ECtHR. But his application was rejected, and after almost two years behind bars he expresses in despair “my scream for justice has faded away in a bottomless pit”. He is not alone, with the ECtHR and international community doing little in light of the Feza Publications debacle and abolishment of the freedom of expression in Turkey.
Appeal to the ECtHR
The Feza Publications takeover and ensuing rights violations, on top of individual pleas for justice, has led to appeals for the entity itself. Two shareholders of Feza Gazetecİlİk A.Ş. (the Feza stock company) took the matter of government-appointed trustees to the Turkish constitutional court. When this appeal failed, they applied to the ECtHR regarding violations of: Article 10, right to freedom of expression; Protocol Article 1, right to property; Article 7 and 6.2, no punishment without law and presumption of innocence; and Article 8, respect for private and family life. Dated 29 July 2016, the application was rejected by ECtHR Judge Nebojsa Vucinic on 14 December 2017 with reference to the Köksal v. Turkey decision.
The decision is reference to a case surrounding Gökhan Köksal, a teacher and one of over 150,000 dismissed from their jobs after the coup attempt. The ECtHR had rejected his appeal on the basis that he must first apply to the Turkish State of Emergency Commission, i.e., first exhaust all domestic avenues. The Köksal decision was problematic. The State of Emergency Commission was established in January 2017 for appeals against dismissals and closures assumed under the state of emergency imposed since 20 July 2016. To date, the Commission has only approved 310 out of 10,010 finalised cases, a 3% success rate. There are almost 100,000 cases still under examination. Many consider the mechanism to be inefficient, and its impartiality questionable. It should not be considered a reliable domestic avenue. Reference to the State of Emergency Commission in relation to Feza Publications poses a further problem; the appointment of government trustees occurred four-and-a-half months before the state of emergency was implemented.
The ECtHR decision is completely inadequate. Although some Feza employees were dismissed under state of emergency decrees, other dismissals and violations pertaining to the Human Rights Convention commenced well before. Although all Feza media outlets (Zaman and Zaman Daily, the Cihan News Agency, Aksiyon magazine, and the Zaman Kitap publishing house) were closed via emergency decree in July 2016, Feza shareholders are not entitled to apply to the State of Emergency Commission. Only persons in charge of the legal entities or institutions at the time of closure – by that point, the government appointed trustees – have the right to apply. Such a situation is implausible, leaving the ECtHR as the only option. Besides, it has been shown that regardless, neither the State of Emergency Commission nor the Turkish judicial system should be considered viable domestic avenues to appeal rights violations.
This ECtHR decision, one in a long line of disappointing rulings for Turkish victims, is seriously flawed. The ECtHR must reconsider the Feza Publications application, alongside those such as Köksal v. Turkey which only pave the way for future rejections. Without adequate ECtHR rulings there is little hope for the upholding of human rights, such as freedom of expression, in Turkey.
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21 May 2018 | Digital Freedom, European Union, Germany, News and features, Russia, United States
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”85524″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]For around six decades after WWII ideas, laws and institutions supporting free expression spread across borders globally. Ever more people were liberated from stifling censorship and repression. But in the past decade that development has reversed.
On April 12 Russian lawmakers in the State Duma completed the first reading of a new draft law on social media. Among other things the law requires social media platforms to remove illegal content within 24 hours or risk hefty fines. Sound familiar? If you think you’ve heard this story before it’s because the original draft was what Reporters Without Borders call a “copy-paste” version of the much criticized German Social Network law that went into effect earlier this year. But we can trace the origins back further.
In 2016 the EU-Commission and a number of big tech-firms including Facebook, Twitter and Google, agreed on a Code of Conduct under which these firms commit to removing illegal hate speech within 24 hours. In other words what happens in Brussels doesn’t stay in Brussels. It may spread to Berlin and end up in Moscow, transformed from a voluntary instrument aimed at defending Western democracies to a draconian law used to shore up a regime committed to disrupting Western democracies.
US President Donald Trump’s crusade against “fake news” may also have had serious consequences for press freedom. Because of the First Amendment’s robust protection of free expression Trump is largely powerless to weaponise his war against the “fake news media” and “enemies of the people” that most others refer to as “independent media”.
Yet many other citizens of the world cannot rely on the same degree of legal protection from thin-skinned political leaders eager to filter news and information. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has documented the highest ever number of journalists imprisoned for false news worldwide. And while 21 such cases may not sound catastrophic the message these arrests and convictions send is alarming. And soon more may follow. In April Malaysia criminalised the spread of “news, information, data and reports which is or are wholly or partly false”, with up to six years in prison. Already a Danish citizen has been convicted to one month’s imprisonment for a harmless YouTube video, and presidential candidate Mahathir Mohammed is also being investigated. Kenya is going down the same path with a draconian bill criminalising “false” or “fictitious” information. And while Robert Mueller is investigating whether Trump has been unduly influenced by Russian President Putin, it seems that Putin may well have been influenced by Trump. The above mentioned Russian draft social media law also includes an obligation to delete any “unverified publicly significant information presented as reliable information.” Taken into account the amount of pro-Kremlin propaganda espoused by Russian media such as RT and Sputnik, one can be certain that the definition of “unverified” will align closely with the interests of Putin and his cronies.
But even democracies have fallen for the temptation to define truth. France’s celebrated president Macron has promised to present a bill targeting false information by “to allow rapid blocking of the dissemination of fake news”. While the French initiative may be targeted at election periods it still does not accord well with a joint declaration issued by independent experts from international and regional organisations covering the UN, Europe, the Americans and Africa which stressed that “ general prohibitions on the dissemination of information based on vague and ambiguous ideas, including ‘false news’ or ‘non-objective information’, are incompatible with international standards for restrictions on freedom of expression”.
However, illiberal measures also travel from East to West. In 2012 Russia adopted a law requiring NGOs receiving funds from abroad and involved in “political activities” – a nebulous and all-encompassing term – to register as “foreign agents”. The law is a thinly veiled attempt to delegitimise civil society organisations that may shed critical light on the policies of Putin’s regime. It has affected everything from human rights groups, LGBT-activists and environmental organisations, who must choose between being branded as something akin to enemies of the state or abandon their work in Russia. As such it has strong appeal to other politicians who don’t appreciate a vibrant civil society with its inherent ecosystem of dissent and potential for social and political mobilisation.
One such politician is Victor Orban, prime minister of Hungary’s increasingly illiberal government. In 2017 Orban’s government did its own copy paste job adopting a law requiring NGOs receiving funds from abroad to register as “foreign supported”. A move which should be seen in the light of Orban’s obsession with eliminating the influence of anything or anyone remotely associated with the Hungarian-American philanthropist George Soros whose Open Society Foundation funds organisations promoting liberal and progressive values.
The cross-fertilisation of censorship between regime types and continents is part of the explanation why press freedom has been in retreat for more than a decade. In its recent 2018 World Press Freedom Index Reporters Without Borders identified “growing animosity towards journalists. Hostility towards the media, openly encouraged by political leaders, and the efforts of authoritarian regimes to export their vision of journalism pose a threat to democracies”. This is something borne out by the litany of of media freedom violations reported to Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom, which monitors 43 countries. In just the last four years, MMF has logged over 4,200 incidents — a staggering array of curbs on the press that range from physical assault to online threats and murders that have engulfed journalists.
Alarmingly Europe – the heartland of global democracy – has seen the worst regional setbacks in RSF’s index. This development shows that sacrificing free speech to guard against creeping authoritarianism is more likely to embolden than to defeat the enemies of the open society.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”100463″ img_size=”full” onclick=”custom_link” img_link_target=”_blank” link=”http://www.freespeechhistory.com”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]
A podcast on the history of free speech.
Why have kings, emperors, and governments killed and imprisoned people to shut them up? And why have countless people risked death and imprisonment to express their beliefs? Jacob Mchangama guides you through the history of free speech from the trial of Socrates to the Great Firewall.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1526895517975-5ae07ad7-7137-1″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
18 May 2018 | Academic Freedom, News and features, Turkey
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”100439″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center”][vc_column_text]When in 2014 sociologist Azat Gündoğan and his wife – both Western-educated professors of Kurdish origin from Turkey – made the decision to move home, they felt excited. The couple had accepted teaching jobs at Mardin Artuklu University – a university created in Turkey’s south-east region, in the city of Mardin, as part of the so-called Kurdish Opening in 2007 – and were looking forward to reuniting with their families, friends and their people.
“When we decided to go back, we knew that we would find great colleagues there. We were so excited to do our research there, bring our experience of alternative world to generally first generation Kurdish students. It was a good thing to do, plus as a family, we would be together,” he recalls.
Little did they know that their euphoria would be short lived, and that it would take something as benevolent as a 2016 peace petition to crush the foundations of Kurdish academia in Turkey.
A small window for Kurdish Academia
For decades, the Turkish state dismissed its 12 million-strong Kurdish minority and their right to education in their native language, let alone Kurdish studies. After being prohibited during the 1990s because the Turkish state saw it as an element of separatism, the Kurdish language resurfaced in public life as Turkey attempted to enter the European Union in the 2000s. The government initiated the Kurdish Opening, a multi-tiered policy approach intended to resolve tensions with the Kurdish minority.
“Unfortunately, in Turkey, like with any other minority, when it comes to Kurdish professors, associate professors, or researchers, it was not an environment where people could openly declare their [ethnic] identity, in academia they would try to cover it to the possible extent, wouldn’t ever try to come forward with their Kurdish identity prior to the Kurdish Opening,” says Ali Akel, freelance journalist and former Washington correspondent for Yeni Şafak newspaper, adding that not a single university taught Kurdish studies prior to the Kurdish Opening, and when there were attempts to do so, the Turkish government shut them down for various technical excuses.
However, during the Kurdish Opening, “Kurdish academics did demonstrate courage to make their positions known,” he says.
Gündoğan recalls that in 2007 the AKP opened a number of universities across the country. One of them, the Mardin Artuklu University, became the cradle of Kurdology. In 2009, Turkey’s Board of Higher Education allowed this university to set up a Department of Living Languages, including Kurdish. The university invited Kurdish scholars from abroad to help. The department was not only to research Kurdish language, history and culture, but also train professors and scholars to teach future generations. In 2009 the head of the board, Yusuf Ziya Özcan said, “This is the model we will use if other universities want to serve citizens who speak different languages,” and then president Abdullah Gül spoke on TV about the importance for the Kurdish minority to use its own language.
Yet many of the efforts were just on paper, Akel says, reminding of an example from 2015, when the Turkish Ministry of Education published the names of the teachers certified for various disciplines.
“How many people do you think there were for the Kurdish language? Just one,” he stressed. “This shows the attitude.”
The Gündoğans, encouraged by the Kurdish Opening, returned home and started teaching at Mardin Artuklu University. But, he says, they felt that things were quickly deteriorating.
“There were local changes: the Kurdish peace process was halted, plus the refugee crisis, and the electoral victory of the HDP [a pro-minority Peoples’ Democratic Party]. And we witnessed the local reflections of these developments. While for the Turkish academia, in general, the turning point was the peace petition, by then in the Kurdish academia we had already started to experience oppression, and the changing attitudes at the university,” Gündoğan says.
In 2015, the liberal rector of the university was replaced by an Erdoğan-backer, and once appointed the new rector terminated contracts with 13 foreign professors. Other professors protested and started organizing to create a collective titled “Independent University Platform” on campus as an alternative academic community, he recalls.
But while Kurdish scholars were fighting to preserve what little was created during the Kurdish Opening window, Turkey was hit by a larger academia crisis.
When calling for peace is a threat to the state
The fledgling process came to the complete halt in February 2016 when numerous members of the Turkish academic circles started circulating a document that became known as a “peace petition.” The document meant as a benevolent appeal to the conscience of the Turkish state and citizenry and calling for the immediate end to hostilities against the civilians in the majority-Kurdish regions of south-eastern Turkey was initially signed by 1,128 academics, reversed the tentative progress of the Kurdish Opening and erased all of its humble gains.
However, Gündoğan considers himself and his wife “the lucky ones” in this entire ordeal: “Our colleagues, their careers are finished. One of them, in Ankara, committed suicide. Others lost jobs. Some are jailed.”
He calls this “the very turning point for the Turkish academia” as it relates to the state’s reaction: “They react only whenever they [the state] feel that there is a point of articulation between the Kurds and the Turks, and alliance that would create a danger, a risk, that would offset the official discourse.”
In his opinion, this was the exact such moment, “Because that initiative didn’t come from the Kurds per se. If it did, as was the case a ton of times in the past, the state could contain it easily, by violence, by marginalisation, by stigmatisation, by oppression.” However, this time, the movement came from academics at the most established and prestigious universities, and they started demanding peace, and the peaceful nature of these demands coming from the most established segments of the society, the academia, was exactly what scared and angered the state, Gündoğan concludes.
Akel agrees, considering the leading role played by the Turkish, rather than Kurdish academia in circulating the peace petition.
Among those who signed the petition, be it from abroad, or from Turkish universities such as Boğaziçi, Galatasaray, Gazi or ODTÜ (Middle East Technical University) “there were Kurds, of course, academics of Kurdish origin,” and in large numbers, according to Akel, which led the government to label the entire initiative as the pro-PKK propaganda and sue many of the signatories, even before the orchestrated crackdown began.
Akel, speaking of the government reaction, says, “I believe, the number of the removed [from university jobs] was 5,200 and growing. It was no longer about those who merely opposed the government, but not actively being on the side of the government was enough.”
Rosa Burç, an ethnically Kurdish academic from Turkey, a political scientist at the University of Bonn, speaking of the scope of the government retaliation and university expulsions in the aftermath of the peace petition, calls it a “witch hunt”: “According to the Turkish state, the [petition] didn’t condemn the terrorists’ actions. So, thus, a whole witch hunt against all kinds of thinkers- academics, writers, journalists, and not just Kurdish, but also non-Kurdish people started there.”
The return of the 1990s
Two years after the peace petition, things are further deteriorating, Gündoğan says. And according to Burç, the charges against the academics were never dropped, and an increasing number of them are losing jobs.
“The ban of the word ‘Kurdistan’ in the parliament happened a few months ago. And then a few weeks ago, they changed it so now you can’t even mention the Kurdish region. This is also reflected in the academia. For example, a Ph.D. student, defending their thesis, using the word ‘Kurdistan’, or anything related to the Kurdish realities. A few of my friends told me that the reviewing committees advise the students to change and remove those words. The general conclusion is that either one has to leave the country to do it, or just stop their Ph.D. thesis. Or they have to adjust to the new standards in the academia,” she says.
She adds, however, that in future there will be research, and “anything that is related to the issue of autonomy, the issue of communalism in the Kurdish areas, the Kurdish identity, since they are considered a threat to the current Turkish government narrative,” will remain banned topics for academics. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1526917973893-b1ee57cb-d4ac-6″ taxonomies=”8843, 55″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
