“Academics for Peace” in Turkey: a case of criminalising dissent and critical thought via counterterrorism policy

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Academics for Peace
• Turkey
• academic freedom
• Kurdish Question

Disclaimer

Two authors of this paper are signatories of the petition. However, in no way do the authors represent “Academics for Peace” as a group and the authors wish to underline that this article solely reflects their personal assessments and viewpoints. None of the statements made or opinions expressed in the article can be attributed to the signatories, collectively or individually, of the “Academics for Peace” petition.

Acknowledgements

The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers Dr Burcu Togral and Didem Oral for their valuable comments on the earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The text was initially written in an open letter format rather than a petition. The signatories included prominent non-Turkish scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Immanuel Wallerstein, Etienne Balibar and David Harvey. The full text is available at http://bianet.org/english/human-rights/170978-academics-we-will-not-be-a-party-to-this-crime.

2. Prof. Ismail Besicki is one of the remarkable examples. He served 17 years in prison for his writings on the Kurds. The imprisonment of Prof. Busra Ersanli in 2011 is also a case in point.

3. “For example, when the the German Parliament passed the Armenian Genocide resolution anonymously on June 2, 2016, university presidents came under pressure to issue public statements supporting Turkish foreign policy” (Gocek 2016).

4. For a detailed account of analysis on the petition from a human rights perspective, see Altıparmak and Akdeniz (2017, 101–139).

5. For more info, see http://michiganintheworld.history.lsa.umich.edu/antivietnamwar/.

6. First author’s personal contact with Prof. Willie Esterhuyse and Prof. Willie Breytenbach, October 2016, Stellenbosch, South Africa.

7. See their website: https://barisicinakademisyenler.net/node/1.

8. A complete list of solidarity messages can be found here: http://internationalsolidarity4academic.tumblr.com/page/2.

9. YÖK has cancelled Dr Stephenson’s work permit in March 2017. He worked in Turkey for 18 years. In the time of writing this article, he is preparing for appeal. Other foreign academics who were working in Turkey and who were signatories to the petition have also lost their work permits.

10. It also bears noting that these types of smear campaign in Turkey frequently happen and in rare cases result in political murders. The cases of Hrant Dink, an Armenian journalist in Turkey, and Tahir Elci, a Kurdish lawyer and human rights activist, are examples of how far stigmatisation can go. For more information on the case of Hrant Dink, see Freely (2007), and for the case of Tahir Elci, see Darici (2016).

11. The Gülen Movement is a political-religious network organised under the ideas of Fethullah Gülen. Even though the Movement has been trying to show itself is an inter-religious and dialogue-based civil society, it has two different faces that are indirectly connected each other. While the civil face is mostly based on philanthropy and cultural dialogue activates, the political face is aiming to reach power via controlling the bureaucratic mechanisms in Turkey that has reach the pick point during the AKP period.

12. One should make a distinction between the academics who were suspended by the emergency decrees because of their alleged connections to the GM and the others who were the signatories of the decision. Also, some of the suspended academics had no connections to the movement but they were employees of higher education institutions which were allegedly linked to the GM. Although all groups are affected by the authoritarian tendencies in Turkey and they had to endure unfair detentions and suspensions, the main reason behind their dismissals is different. The signatories are targeted by the government and the president, and consequently by other state apparatuses due to their stance on human rights issues in Turkey. Their political stance on the Kurdish Question and how to tackle with the creeping authoritarianism in Turkey also is clearly distinct from the GM and its supporters. The GM and its media apparatuses have also instrumentalised the counterterrorism rhetoric until they broke up their alliance with the AKP government and their attitude has been systematically criticised by most of the signatories of the petition.

13. Mehmet Fatih Traş was a research assistant at Cukurova University. He committed suicide in February 2017 as a result of psychological trauma after being dismissed from his job.

Additional information

Funding

Bahar Baser wishes to thank the South African National Research Foundation for funding her research. This article was written while she was a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Faculty of Military Science, Stellenbosch University. Ahmet Erdi Öztürk and Samim Akgönül wish to thank the research centre DRES of the University of Strasbourg for excellent work conditions provided during the writing process of this article.

Notes on contributors

Bahar Baser

Bahar Baser is a research fellow at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations (CTPSR) at Coventry University and an associate research fellow at the Security Institute for Governance and Leadership in Africa (SIGLA) at Stellenbosch University.

Samim Akgönül

Samim Akgönül is a Professor at University of Strabourg, Faculty of Law, Social Science and History and a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He also teaches political science at Syracuse University.

Ahmet Erdi Öztürk

Ahmet Erdi Öztürk is a PhD Candidate and Research Assistant at University of Strasbourg, Faculty of Law, Social Science and History. He is currently a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. Ozturk is the Turkey correspondent for EUREL (Sociological and Legal Data on Religions in Europe).