10 Aug 2016 | Academic Freedom, Campaigns -- Featured, Europe and Central Asia, mobile, News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
The stream may be small right now, a trickle, but it is unmistakable. Turkey’s academics and secular elite are quietly and slowly making their way for the exits.
Some months ago, in the age before Turkey’s post-coup crushing of academia, a respected university lecturer told me she was seeking happiness outside Turkey. She was teaching economics at one of Istanbul’s major universities, but neither her nor her husband, who is also in the financial sector, had a desire to remain in the country any longer. They simply packed up and left for Canada.
The growing unease about the future is now accelerating among the academics and mainly secular elite in the country. This well-educated section of society is feeling the pressure more than any other, and as the instability mounts the urge to join the “brain drain” will only increase.
Some of them, particularly those academics who have been fired and those who now face judicial charges for signing a petition calling for a return to peace negotiations with the Kurdish PKK, no longer see a future for their careers. With the government further empowered by emergency rule decrees, the space for debate and unfettered learning is shrinking.
One of the petition’s signatories, the outspoken sociologist Dr Nil Mutluer, has already moved to a role at the well-respected Humboldt University in Berlin to teach in a programme devoted to scholars at risk.
You only have to look at the numbers to realise why more are likely to follow in the footsteps of those who have already left Turkey. In the days after the failed coup that struck at the country’s imperfect democracy, the government of president Recep Tayyip Erdogan swept 1,577 university deans from their posts. Academics who were travelling abroad were ordered to return to the country, while others were told they could not travel to conferences for the foreseeable future. Some foreign students have even been sent home. The pre-university educational system has been hit particularly hard: the education ministry axed 20,000 employees and 21,000 teachers working at private schools had their teaching licenses revoked.
Anyone with even the whiff of a connection to FETO — the Erdogan administration’s stalking horse for the parallel government supposedly backed by the Gulenist movement — is in the crosshairs. Journalists, professors, poets and independent thinkers who dare question the prevailing narrative dictated by the Justice and Development Party will hear a knock at the door.
It appears that the casualty of the coup will be the ability to debate, interrogate and speak about competing ideas. That’s the heart of academic freedom. The coup and the president’s reaction to it have ripped it from Turkey’s chest.
But it’s not just the academics who are starting to go. The secular elite and people of Kurdish descent that are also likely to vote with their feet.
Signs are, that those who are exposed to, or perceive, pressure, are already doing this. Scandinavian countries have noted an increase in the exodus of the Turkish citizens. Deutsche Welle’s Turkish news site reported that 1719 people sought asylum in Germany in the first half of this year. This number already equals the total of Turkish asylum seekers who registered during the whole of 2015. Not surprisingly, 1510 of applications in 2016 came from Kurds, who are under acute pressure from the government.
The secular (upper) middle class is also showing signs of moving out. The economic daily Dünya reported on Monday that the number of inquiries into purchasing homes abroad grew four-to-five times the pre-coup level. Many real estate agencies, the paper reported, are expanding their staff to meet the demand. Murat Uzun, representing Proje Beyaz firm, told Dünya:
“The demand is growing since July 15 by every day. Emergency rule has also pushed up the trend. These people are trying to buy a life abroad. Ten to twelve people visit our office every day….Many ask about the citizenship issues.”
Adnan Bozbey, of Coldwell Banker, told the paper that people were asking him: “Is Turkey becoming a Middle Eastern country?”
According to Dünya, the USA, Ireland, Portugal, Greece, Malta and Baltic countries are popular among those who want to seek life prospects elsewhere.
In short, the unrest is spreading. Unless the dust settles and the immense political maneuvering about the course Turkey is on reverses, it would be realistic to presume that a significant demographic shift will take place in the near future.
A version of this article originally appeared on Suddeutsche Zeitung. It is posted here with the permission of the author.
Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
29 Jul 2016 | Academic Freedom, Campaigns -- Featured, Europe and Central Asia, Mapping Media Freedom, News and features, Turkey
People gather in solidarity with the press outside Zaman newspaper in Istanbul in March 2016
By Ianka Bhatia and Sean Vannata
The spotlight has been on Turkey following the attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the government’s ensuing crackdown on journalists, teachers, judges and soldiers. How did it come to this? Here are five key articles on Turkey from Index on Censorship showing the escalation of threats to freedom of expression prior to July’s failed coup.
1. Silence on campus
Early in 2015, an academic at Ankara University’s political sciences department spent an evening writing questions for an exam. He never for one minute suspected that one of those questions might lead to death threats. Index’s Turkey editor Kaya Genç reported on the struggle for academic freedom in Turkey’s election year for the summer 2015 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
2. “Judicial coup” sends clear warning to Turkey’s remaining independent journalists
“Nothing could illustrate the course of developments in Turkey better than the case of prosecutor Murat Aydın,” Yavuz Baydar wrote for Index on 8 June 2016. “In what was described as a ‘judicial coup’ in critical media, Aydin was one of 3,746 judges and prosecutors, who were reassigned in recent days, an unprecedented move that has shaken the basis of the justice system. Some were demoted by being sent into internal “exile”, some were promoted.”
3. Turkey war on journalists rages on
The ongoing deterioration in Turkey’s press freedom has been well documented by Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project since its launch in 2014. Back in March 2015, Index’s assistant online editor Ryan McChrystal looked at how, with journalists being killed, detained and prevented from working, the crackdown on Turkey’s media only appears to be getting worse.
4. Interviews with Turkey’s struggling investigative reporters
Kaya Genç interviews writers from the acclaimed independent newspaper Radikal about its closure and the shape of Turkish investigative journalism today for the summer 2016 issue of Index on Censorship magazine.
5. Turkey’s film festivals face a narrowing space for expression
The Siyah Bant initiative, which carries out research on censorship of the arts in Turkey, has given much coverage to obstacles to freedom of expression in the cinematic field in research published in recent years. In June 2016, Index published a report on cases of censorship at Turkish film festivals.
23 Jul 2016 | Academic Freedom, Campaigns -- Featured, Europe and Central Asia, Mapping Media Freedom, mobile, News and features, Turkey, Turkey Uncensored
It was at the early hours of Friday that a journalist sent a note to her colleagues.
“We are told by the management that our publication is discontinued with immediate effect,” she said. “We are told to pack our belongings and leave the office. You can’t imagine how sad I am.”
The weekly news magazine Nokta, which had been launched in the aftermath of a military coup in 1980s, is no more.
Lately, under a new management, Nokta belonged to the critical mass of what remained of independent journalism in Turkey, with long reads and popular, bright commentators such as Perihan Mağden and Gükhan Özgün.
My colleague went on to say that the management internal communique cited the loss of a printing house as the reason for the closure. Given the waves of restriction over basic freedoms in the wake of Emergency Rule declared in 81 provinces of Turkey, this explanation came as no surprise.
Commenting on the closure, a Kurdish colleague who has extensively covered the operations in Cizre and Diyarbakır, added: “It’s a disaster to have the media outlets shut down, but it’s even worse to see media professionals left without a job.”
In another incident, Paolo Brera, a well-known reporter with La Repubblica, was held by the police officers at Sultanahmet Square yesterday while interviewing tourists, and taken to police headquarters. At first his whereabouts were unknown, and Italy had to intervene at the highest level to have him released after four hours.
As of Friday afternoon the situation of the columnist and human rights lawyer Orhan Kemal Cengiz was unclear. Cengiz is an international figure and close friend of the Kurdish lawyer Tahir Elçi who was assassinated in Diyarbakır last summer. Among other assignments, Cengiz followed the case of Christian missionaries slain in Malatya in 2007. He attended the UN’s Human Rights Summit in Geneva some months ago, commemorating by explaining the situation to a larger audience. His colleagues are on standby, knowing that he is held at the Anti-Terror Unit in Istanbul. His wife, also a lawyer, had been told that the detention was related to a case from 2014, but nobody has any further details.
The Emergency Rule means that no lawyers other than those appointed by the bar associations are now allowed to have access to all the cases. What is also known is that those who are arrested are held in cells at police headquarters.
Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ said in an interview yesterday that in “crimes related to terrorist activities” individuals can be detained for at least seven-to-eight days. “Our staff is working on the possibilities of even extending that time,” he said, adding that he shares the concern that it will be very difficult to distinguish innocents from criminals.
The overall situation continues to be opaque, with scarce information, and experienced journalists caution each other to compare what’s being officially stated with what’s really being done. The measures so far leave little doubt that the media and the academia are under severe pressure, and the growing concern is there is an escalation of a clampdown, without much explanation of what the media and academic freedom had to do with the very coup attempt itself.
A version of this article was originally posted to Suddeutsche Zeitung. It is published here with permission of the author.
Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
22 Jul 2016 | Academic Freedom, Academic Freedom Statements, Campaigns, Campaigns -- Featured, Statements
Index on Censorship is appalled by the decision by the University of Cape Town to rescind an invitation to Danish editor Flemming Rose to deliver the annual TB Davie lecture on academic freedom – especially at a time when academic freedom is under threat around the world – and considering recent events in Turkey.
Rose, the editor responsible for publishing controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005, was invited last year to give the August 2016 lecture, which UCT describes as a “flagship lecture to promote academic freedom and freedom of speech” and which is organised by the university’s academic freedom committee.
However, in a letter sent by UCT Vice-Chancellor Max Price on 12 July, Price tells the committee that the university executive had decided “it would be extremely unwise to proceed with the address.”
What follows in the letter is an attempt by Price to justify a decision that makes a mockery of the university’s supposed defence of free speech and academic freedom.
Price – who signed an Index on Censorship letter defending academic freedom last year – begins by pointing out that no freedoms are unlimited, and highlights the limitations on free speech imposed by the South African constitution in which the right to free speech does not extend to propaganda for war, incitement of violence or advocacy of hatred. The implication of this reference is that Rose’s speech might amount in some way to one of these three. This is a dangerous and damaging route for an academic institution to take.
The letter then goes on to say that Rose’s appearance might provoke conflict on campus, pose security risks and might “retard rather than advance academic freedom on campus.” Although the letter acknowledges that the university considered holding the event as a debate with some representatives of the Muslim community – and acknowledges these representatives had been open to the idea – the letter goes on to say: “However, Mr Rose is seen by many as persona non grata and while most would protest peacefully against him, we believe there is a real danger that among those offended by the cartoons, an element may resort to violence.”
The academic freedom committee responded to Price, saying in a statement: “Academic freedom is severely compromised when security and other pragmatic considerations preclude inviting speakers who – while controversial – in no way violate our Constitutional limitations on free speech… We regret the Executive’s decision and what it reveals about the limited scope of academic freedom at UCT. Ours should be a campus on which people are free to express and contest ideas, even unpopular ones.”
The decision taken by the administration of UCT is a clear example of a type of “assassin’s veto” in which those who argue they are offended by the speech of others can use the threat of violence to silence those with whom they disagree.
Jodie Ginsberg, Index on Censorship chief executive said: “This a huge blow to free expression and academic freedom and UCT’s attempts to dress this up as otherwise are to be condemned in the strongest terms.”
Also read:
Flemming Rose responds to the University of Cape Town
Dr Max Price, Vice-Chancellor of UCT, letter to the academic freedom committee
UCT Academic freedom committee response to Dr. Max Price
UCT statement: Withdrawal of invitation to speaker of TB Davie Academic Freedom Lecture
Kenan Malik: Academic freedom and academic cowardice
