Crossing the Line

Supporters of sociologist Pinar Selek outside a courthouse in Istanbul, 9 February 2011

Credit: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty

Turkish scholars who dare to challenge taboos may end up on trial. Maureen Freely assesses the climate

Derya Bayır won acclaim for her dissertation last year when it was judged one of the best on a Turkish subject by a student in Europe. Her research at Queen Mary, University of London to be published by Ashgate in 2013, links the exclusion and persecution of minorities with the state’s monolithic definition of Turkishness, showing how deeply the concept is embedded in jurisprudence and the law. Despite the accolade, Derya doubts that any law faculty in Turkey will be prepared to give her a job: back home, her area of expertise is still taboo. Any academic who dedicates their career to exploring subjects that question state ideology – from the notion of Turkishness, to the legacy of Atatürk and the status of Kurdish and Armenian minorities – may fall foul of the authorities. The problem is rooted, Derya believes, in the very structure of higher education in Turkey, and most particularly the Higher Education Council (YÖK). Founded in the immediate aftermath of the 12 September 1980 coup, the most brutal in living memory, it reorganised education along strict military lines, requiring professors to instil in their students the ‘national, moral, humanitarian, spiritual and cultural values of the Turkish nation’, encouraging them to be ‘proud and happy to be Turks’, putting ‘the needs of society above personal ambitions’, revering Family, Country and Nation and eager to put their patriotic duties and responsibilities into practice.

All council members are appointed by the president. Those serving on its committee are appointed by the president, the committee of ministers, the council of state or the military General Staff. These are the people who set the limits of each discipline, the so-called red lines. The aim, in the words of Derya Bayır, is to prevent scholars from moving ‘out of the box set by the state and the law’.

When it first came into being, YÖK cast a very long shadow. There were mass dismissals, with many other academics resigning in protest. Many thousands of lecturers and students were already in prison, and many more in exile; more now followed. But by the 1990s, when Turkey had opened its economy, also relaxing its iron control of communications, many felt sufficiently encouraged to make the return journey. The university sector was expanding rapidly, and as Turkey moved ever closer to European accession, it was again possible on the few liberal islands within the academic establishment to engage in critical scholarship on Turkish history, politics, society and literature, at least to some degree. Most academics in those fields had strong links with colleagues working in their areas in universities in North America and Europe.

Over the past 15 years, and thanks in large part to these international collaborations, there has been a great deal of important work published on the taboo areas, transforming whole disciplines within and outside Turkey, and even, in some cases, public debate. But it remains a risky enterprise. Those lower down the ladder need to be careful in their choice of words, and even in their choice of language. ‘Writing in English is a safeguard,’ says Kerem Öktem, research fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford. ‘I have a lot of friends who’ve stopped writing in Turkish altogether.’

A student is detained after shouting during a debate on the government’s ‘Kurdish initiative’, Ankara, 13 November 2009

Credit: AP Photo

Working abroad is another safeguard, but even this does not offer full protection. In earlier years, when Öktem was a post-doctoral fellow at St Antony’s, he was informed by a reliable source that the Turkish Embassy had opened a file on him which they sent to the Foreign Ministry in Ankara, accusing him of engaging in pro-Armenian (and hence anti-state) research. At the same time, a prominent Turkish university sent letters to the University of Oxford casting aspersions on his character. This did not stop him writing on forbidden or discouraged topics, or from joining the networks then reopening the debate on the Armenian genocide, but he limited what he said in print: ‘Now I do more.’

The most important chair in contemporary Turkish studies in this country is at the LSE. The position is currently occupied by Şevket Pamuk, the distinguished economic historian, better known outside his field as the brother of Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk. Like many university positions in Turkish Studies in the US, it is funded by a consortium of Turkish banks and foundations. All possess strong links to the political establishment, and that creates potential difficulties for any candidate known to have crossed the state’s so-called red lines.

What some now refer to as the ‘Turkish spring’ was well underway when the AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power in 2002. The party’s pro-market, pro-Europe brand of Islamism seemed mild after the fiery fundamentalist rhetoric of the Islamist parties that the military had banned in previous decades. Many red-line scholars were glad to see it challenge the military and the state bureaucracies (YÖK amongst them) that continued to enforce the Kemalist brand of nationalist secularist authoritarianism. Many more were now daring to write about the Kurdish problem, the Armenian genocide and Kemalism. And yet, as Erol Köroğlu, professor of Turkish Language and Literature at Boğaziçi University, points out, there was always ‘a danger of being prosecuted, going to trial because of books or articles published. The Anti-Terror Law, the infamous Article 301 and similar laws give opportunities to prosecutors who want to open lawsuits on academic or non-academic publications’.

The new religious agenda is broad and growing broader

In the early days of AKP ascendance, there was still a hope that this new anti-establishment party aimed to dismantle not just the coup-sponsored 1982 constitution but also the state bureaucacies that put it into force. What the AKP did, however, was to remove the Kemalists from these institutions and replace them with their own people. Instead of reforming these bodies, they have used them to impose their own brand of nationalist Islamist authoritarianism.

With the consolidation of power has come a sharpening of anti-secular rhetoric, never more so than when the subject is education and the proper place of religion in the curriculum. In February, Erdoğan proclaimed that it was his ambition to create a new generation of religious youth: a bald challenge to the secularists whom the prime minister has likened to ‘thinning addicts’. The new religious agenda is broad and growing broader: there is the government’s growing hostility to women’s rights, and its recent and very sudden decision to ban abortion – never a matter for controversy until now. There is also a budding romance with creationism, which began with the government stopping TÜBITAK (the Turkish Science and Technology Research Council) from publishing a 2009 issue celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday, and at the same time sacking its editor.

The AKP has, most concede, done more than its predecessors to solve what is commonly known as the Kurdish problem, and what historian Baki Tezcan with some irony calls the Turkish problem ‘because it’s the Turks who have trouble recognising Kurds as real human beings’. In Mardin University, located in the country’s largely south-east, there is even a Kurdish studies programme. It stays within the lines set by the state, of course. This is not enough progress for those allied with the Kurdish democratic movement, for long the most organised force of opposition in the country. Its calls for full citizenship rights for Turkish Kurds are finding ever broader support on university campuses, and a common cause with Turkish students on the left. This has led in turn to a crackdown on dissent in the university sector – not just the sacking of scholars who research on Kurdish issues, but also the arrest of thousands of students under counter-terrorism legislation, which allows for lengthy pre-trial detention. It is difficult to assess the number of students currently behind bars, but conservative estimates put it at 700.

Turkish students belonging to socialist organisations are often charged with membership of Revolutionary Headquarters, an organisation that many believe no longer exists, while Kurdish students are generally charged with membership of the KCK (Union of Communities in Kurdistan), which the government claims is the urban branch of the armed Kurdish separatist PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). The common understanding of this ploy is illustrated in a recent cartoon in a popular satirical magazine, featuring a KCK leader who is full of regret at not knowing what a large membership the group had, and who promises to keep better records in future.

Students have been targeted in a number of cases this year. Cihan Kırmızıgül, a Galatasaray university engineering student, was sentenced in May to 11 years for wearing a traditional Kurdish ‘poshu’ scarf; Şeyma Özcan, a Boğaziçi University history student, was detained last year because she applied for the same work experience position as another student charged with membership of Revolutionary Headquarters; countless others have been arrested because they attended demonstrations calling for Kurdish language rights, free university tuition and the reform of YÖK itself. In June, 90 medical students in five cities were taken into custody, under suspicion of being the medical wing of the KCK. It was alleged that they had, amongst other charges, sought to alienate the public from the government health services - this because they had been offering free blood pressure and diabetes tests in poor neighbourhoods. A student who collected 500TL (less than 200 pounds sterling) for a picnic was deemed to be the medical wing’s finance officer.

Students clash with riot police during a protest over government interference in university appointments and excessive force employed by police, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, 5 January 2011

Credit: AP Photo

There is also Büşra Ersanlı, the distinguished Marmara University professor, who was detained at the end of October 2011 on charges that were not disclosed even to her own lawyers. She became a target, most believe, because she was a member of the BDP (Peace and Democracy Party, a legal democratic Kurdish party, with seats in the national assembly) and gave lectures to its supporters. Her arrest sparked outrage throughout the academic community. Erol Köroğlu describes her as ‘a perfect public intellectual, educator and academic’ and a ‘very successful example of intellectual responsibility’. She is being prosecuted, he says, ‘because she is a conscientious and responsible intellectual. She is simply a nice person and a good Samaritan. She has worked for every democratic movement and for the development of a more democratic Turkey’. Like all ‘decent academics’ in Turkey, she is ‘a good researcher, good social worker and a good teacher’. If she lived abroad, he says, ‘she would be a very famous and effective political science person’. If nothing else, a post abroad would have allowed her to give more time to her research, and less time to defending the right to research. ‘This is our fate in Turkey. You have to be a social worker, an academic, a teacher with a heavy teaching load, and a politician at the same time.’

Older academics speak of a climate of fear

After waiting nine months for her first hearing, Ersanlı was released, pending trial. The case is expected to continue for many years - which is the rule in trials like this and a means of disabling a dissident’s life and career. Ersanlı had to wait until 2 July 2012 for her first hearing. The feminist sociologist Pinar Selek is still being prosecuted in connection with an explosion (allegedly a PKK bomb, but more probably a faulty gas cannister) in the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul. Despite having been acquitted in 2002, 2006 and 2010, the case continues. So too does the hate campaign: she is routinely smeared in the media, with her name turning up in accounts of KCK trials. It is widely believed that she was targeted for work she had done on Istanbul’s Kurds.

These cases, and the labelling of all other forms of dissent as terrorist, have prompted older academics to speak of a climate of fear that reminds them of the early 1980s, when the military used YÖK to bend universities to its will. Others believe that what we are seeing now is the beginning of something much worse, with colleges proliferating that are no more than ‘diploma factories’ and red lines that promote a growing hostility to science – further complicating the assault on academic freedom. An alarming number of univerities are disciplining (and expelling) students who have been charged (but not yet found guilty) with membership of the KCK or Revolutionary Hearth.

Even Sabanci, the private university known to be the most liberal in the country, with a famously eloquent defence of free expression on its website, did not permit its students to put up posters advertising this year’s May Day demonstrations, on account of their carrying, albeit in the tiniest print, the logo of the (legal) BDP. University rectors appear to be afraid or unwilling to stand up to YÖK: conferences and seminars that their new masters may view as seditious are cancelled and even repudiated.

Despite the intimidation, the anger on campuses is visible and growing. University lecturers have set up an organisation called ‘Don’t Touch My Student’ while another group, the Initiative for Solidarity with Arrested Students, has undertaken to count and map the students now in detention. There is also GIT (the Transnational Work Group on Academic Liberty and Freedom of Research in Turkey), a loose-knit web of scholars inside and outside Turkey that began in France late last year and now has chapters in the US and England. (I am a signatory). Back home, it has been campaigning fiercely for Büşra Ersanlı while also working hard to draw attention to the hundreds of prisoners whose names we do not yet know. Its Turkish chapter has run an open-air lecture series outside prisons, and, in alliance with the other above-mentioned networks, as well as its own European and American chapters, it is trying to alert the outside world to the crisis.

It is, in a sense, picking up where an earlier electronic network, left off: WATS, the Workshop for Turkish/Armenian Scholarship, which operated out of the University of Michigan, connecting more than 700 scholars, journalists, writers, and activists, during the first decade of this century. Faciliated by the Turkish-born scholar Müge Göçek, its aim was to create a space for the proper scholarly discussion of the Armenian genocide, linking all those inside Turkey with an interest in the issue with scholarly debates abroad. And so it did. But in the long run, and as much thanks to its stormier seasons as its calm ones, it did a great deal more. It pulled red-line scholars out of isolation, drawing them into an international community of like-minded researchers and thinkers. Whenever they were harrassed, intimidated, and prosecuted, this community responded quickly to campaign on their behalf. Whether researching the Armenian genocide or Ottoman and republican history, scholars would sooner or later collide with the red lines protecting state ideology.

As with so many electronic networks, a moment arrived when the centre could not hold. But in all the countries where its participants lived and worked, it had by then fostered social networks of scholars that have lasted. These have gone on to foster a new generation of scholars. In the past, says Müge Göçek, most Turks studying abroad went into the sciences, engineering or medicine. But now she is seeing an increasing number of students going abroad to do critical work on the Armenian and Kurdish issues, gender issues and the law. Whatever obstacles they might encounter along the way, these younger scholars will inevitably change the face of work on Turkey: ‘The dominant discourse outside Turkey will no longer reproduce the official line.’

What happens inside Turkey also seems predictable, so long as YÖK persists in its current form. When red-line scholars in Turkish universities challenge the state − newly Islamicised, but as nationalist and authoritarian as ever – they will need the support of like-minded colleagues abroad. But there are problems here, too, as Baki Tezcan, one of the founders of the American chapter of GIT, pointed out to me. Back in February, when Prime Minister Erdoğan proclaimed his intention to create a new generation of religious youth, a Facebook group helped circulate a petition of protest that garnered 3,014 signatures. When the group then proposed a YouTube version, in which signatories would take turns reading lines from their letter of protest, each and every signatory they approached inside Turkey came back with the same response: they were honoured to have been asked, and of course they would have liked to participate, but if they took part in a protest in such a public arena, they would be putting their research projects, their careers, and even their futures, at risk.

Tezcan tells me this story to illustrate not just the constraints on his colleagues in Turkey, but also the importance of working together to find a way through. When I visited YouTube, I was impressed by the sophistication of their solution. Nine unnamed scholars based overseas take turns to recite the letter of protest: we then see the names of the 3,014 signatories, and the number of hits – 118,846. The figure of 100,000 was reached in the first week, I’m told. It is yet another sign that, whatever the structures of the state, and however much it wishes to stamp out dissent, expectations amongst students and young scholars are rising. ‘Turkey is so proud to be part of the G20,’ says Baki Tezcan. ‘Why not also be proud to be one of the world’s top democracies? We need to ask for more. We deserve more.’

It remains to be seen if scholars based in Turkey and abroad can continue to organise effectively – veterans of WATS will remember the many ways in which electronic networks can be manipulated and kept under surveillance by fake friends with agendas. But the fight for academic freedom in Turkey has well and truly broken through the lines set by the state. It is electronic and international and will be hard, perhaps impossible, to quell.