TURKEY

Mustafa Özben, an academic, was walking towards his car in Ankara, the Turkish capital, in broad daylight when he was seized and forced into a black transporter van.

“They pulled me out of the van and stripped my clothes off,” the academic told judges of the Turkey Tribunal, a civil society-led symbolic international tribunal established to adjudicate recent human rights violations in Turkey, on Monday.

Özben was locked up in a small cell with just enough light for the camera inside the room to operate.

He was convinced that his abductors were agents of the state because they showed him photos of other people taken under surveillance and images of people captured by CCTV all over Ankara.

“Mustafa, here we are the state,” the abductors told him. “Now the state is being abducted in a different manner. If you do as we say, we will send a note to the prosecutor and you will be set free. We will give you a new identity and a lot of money.

“Or else, we know human anatomy very well. We can make you beg us to kill you.”

Özben taught at Turgut Özal University, which was shut down by decree after the failed attempted coup of July 2016, due to alleged links to the movement of Fethullah Gülen an influential Turkish cleric living in exile in the United States-based Turkish whom Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused of being behind the attempted putsch, a claim that Gülen and his movement strongly deny.

Özben told judges at the tribunal that he was given electric shocks, brutal beatings, continuous insults and threats against his wife and children.

He was held in the cell for 92 days before being released.

Asked by the judges to explain the impact of the torture, he said the toughest thing to bear throughout the period of incarceration and torture was not knowing the fate of his family.

Özben was one of a number of victims of enforced disappearance, allegedly perpetrated by agents of the state, who testified before the judges of the symbolic international tribunal, and this account of his testimony was reported by Turkish Minute and publicised by the Stockholm Center for Freedom.

The tribunal, under the initiative of Belgian-based law firm Van Steenbrugge Advocaten, met in Geneva between 21 and 25 September and its judges included Professor Emeritus Dr Françoise Barones Tulkens, former vice chairperson of the European Court of Human Rights; Justice Dr Johann van der Westhuizen, a former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa; and Professor Emeritus Dr Giorgio Malinverni and Professor Dr Ledi Bianku, who served as judges of the European Court of Human Rights.

Rapporteur Johan Vande Lanotte, a professor of law at Ghent University in Belgium who coordinated the tribunal, presented a report that claimed recent cases of enforced disappearance and torture in Turkey are crimes against humanity.

“When it comes to crimes against humanity, national courts, the International Criminal Court and the various versions of the Magnitsky Act are the options,” Lanotte said.

State abductions ‘widespread and systematic’

The Turkish government denies the existence of torture and internal abductions, but Lanotte maintained that internal and international abductions by agents of the Turkish state are widespread and systematic, with at least 25 people abducted in Turkey by Turkish intelligence since 2016 and at least 68 abducted abroad.

The abductions are part of a broader strategy of dismantling and deterring support both for the Gülen movement and other movements and political viewpoints, a strategy that has included over the past five years a systematic attack on academics.

Under Erdogan’s increasingly neonationalist regime, large numbers of academics have been targeted for arrest and detention, universities have been closed and thousands of academics fired.

Followers of the Gülen movement, which was influential in the police and judiciary, have been targeted since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated Erdogan, then prime minister, and members of his family and close political circle.

Previously Gülen and Erdogan were allies, sharing an interest in increasing the recognition and influence of Islamic values and identity in the country, but a rift developed and Gülen’s movement, which supports schools, education foundations and civil society organisations, was designated a ‘terrorist organisation’ by the government.

The attempted coup – although scant admissible evidence has so far been produced of the link to the Gülen movement – was used as an excuse to target anyone alleged to be connected to the movement.

However, the attack on academia predates the coup and goes wider than claimed affiliation to the Gülen movement. Six months before the coup, many Turkish academics signed an Academics for Peace petition demanding an end to military operations against Kurdish militants in civilian areas and asking for the opening of a peace dialogue. This led to the first significant wave of faculty persecutions.

Prior to that, a civil society protest in Istanbul’s Gezi Park in 2013 spiralled into protests nationwide that included faculty and students and led to restrictions on free speech.

Erdogan has used these and other events as opportunities to silence voices critical of his government and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), as part of a slide into authoritarianism.

Redeploying the tools of nationalism

As I outline in a contributed chapter on Turkey in Neo-nationalism and Universities: Populists, autocrats and the future of higher education by John Aubrey Douglass, Erdogan is pursuing not so much a new form of nationalism as a redeployment of the tools of nationalism to consolidate the power of a different elite.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded modern Turkey on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, had imposed a secular vision and cultural homogeneity on the country that involved denying or restricting expression of Muslim identity for large portions of the country, despite its people being overwhelmingly Muslim.

The Turkish Republic’s secular nature and Atatürk’s authority were protected with extraordinary zeal under the terms of the constitution, which restricted criticism. Atatürk abolished the Caliphate, enforced a change from the use of Arabic script to Roman script and banned the Fez in an attempt to shift Turkey towards becoming a modern Western-oriented state. This was despite the country being 99% Muslim.

He also established a one-party state and the role of the military as guardians of the secular republic’s constitution, a role that the generals went on to uphold after the Atatürk era by staging various military coups (in 1960, 1971 and 1980) and a soft coup in 1997, imposing their own safeguards against Islamism, including the controversial ban on women wearing headscarves at university from 1997.

One tool Atatürk used to restrict dissent was Article 159 of the 1926 Turkish Penal Code, under which insults to Turkishness could be prosecuted.

Under Erdogan, whose party came to power in 2002 and who has led the country either as elected prime minister or elected president since 2003, the article was replaced by what became the infamous catch-all Article 301, under which many journalists, academics and intellectuals, including the Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk, have been prosecuted for acts deemed to insult either Turkishness, Turkish institutions or Turkish heroes, including Atatürk himself.

In 2005, the AKP government instrumentalised another Article, 299, which punishes the offence of insulting the Turkish president with up to four years in prison.

Erdogan consolidated his power, creating an executive presidency to which he was elected, and reduced the influence of the military. Along the way he introduced more religious freedom by lifting the headscarf ban in universities – although secularists saw this as a threat to secularism.

But he later clamped down on civil liberties in response to the Gezi Park protests with marshal law-style restraints and arbitrary arrests. In the first five years after Erdogan took office as president, between 2014 and 2019, nearly 130,000 investigations were launched into breaches of Article 299 and nearly 30,000 prosecutions were opened. In 2019 alone, 3,800 people were sent to prison after being judged to have breached the article.

Article 301 was the tool used to prosecute many of the 1,128 signatories from 89 universities of the Academics for Peace petition. Erdogan accused them of engaging in “terrorist propaganda” on behalf of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK and bracketed anyone who had signed as an “enemy of the state”.

‘Chilling effect’ on political discourse

Following his cue, the Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation into all the signatories, with what former US ambassador to Turkey John Bass described as a “chilling effect on legitimate political discourse”.

Some 491 academics were later, in 2019, acquitted of the ‘terrorist propaganda’ charge but others had their retrial requests turned down.

When, on 15 July 2016, a faction of the army tried to seize power in a military coup, even bombing the presidential complex in an attempt to kill Erdogan, 240 people were killed and 1,500 wounded as civilian protesters took to the streets in defence of democracy.

The coup attempt failed. But Erdogan declared a state of emergency and used the opportunity that the granting of emergency powers presented to launch the biggest purge in Turkey’s modern history, targeting not just Gülenists but Kurdish activists and leftists or anyone perceived as such. The scope and arbitrary nature of the purge was startling.

Academia was one of the sectors prominently targeted. More than 23,420 academics were dismissed from jobs or lost tenure for allegedly supporting Gülen. Some universities were simply closed. Many university rectors worked with the intelligence services to identify and fire faculty and staff. Most were officially listed as ‘terrorists’ with no right to recourse.

Those who were dismissed were also banned for life from working in public service and effectively blacklisted from securing comparable jobs in the private sector. In many cases their passports were cancelled, so they could not get a job abroad either. In some cases, their severance pay was blocked and their bank accounts frozen.

Academics described their situation as “like being sentenced to civil death”, effectively banned from work and forced into poverty.

The arbitrary nature of the purge was highlighted by cases such as that of Sedat Laciner, whose family passed messages from him in prison to University World News. A professor of international relations and former rector at one of Turkey’s largest state higher education institutions, Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, he was a critic of government policy and restrictions on freedom of expression.

He was arrested in July 2016, telling University World News in October 2016 that he had been held with 20 other people in a room designed for four people without being told what he was being charged with. He continued to be detained until his trial in September 2018 when he was given a nine-year prison sentence for allegedly being a member of the Gülen movement, even though he was a well-known liberal secular author and strongly denied being a member.

Arrests and convictions continue today

The arrests, detentions and imprisonments are continuing, more than five years after the coup.

Last week, on 23 September, former rector of the Diyarbakir-based Dicle University, Professor Dr Aysegül Jale Sarac, and former vice rector Professor Dr Aytekin Sir were each sentenced to six years and three months in prison by the Diyarbakir 4th High Criminal Court for their alleged links to the Gülen movement, Turkish Minute reported.

In her defence Sarac argued that there was no concrete evidence against her.

“Those who testified against me are the people who ran against me in the rectorship election or who supported my rivals. Therefore, they may have testified due to a grudge against me,” she said.

The court, however, did not take her defence into consideration.

Tightening control over universities

Besides targeting individual academics and students – in what Scholars at Risk has described as “sweeping actions against members of the higher education community” that have a “chilling effect on academic freedom and undermine democratic society generally” – Erdogan’s government sought greater control over Turkey’s universities.

Since 2013 Erdogan had begun concentrating power over appointments and accreditation in the hands of the Council of Higher Education or YÖK, which had broad authority like a ministry of higher education, and previously, having been set up by the military, had been the key vehicle for upholding the headscarf ban.

After the coup attempt, Erdogan abolished rector elections at public universities so that he could appoint them himself, from a list of three candidates recommended by YÖK, and in 2018 he abolished even YÖK’s involvement, leaving himself as president free to pick the rectors he wanted, as long as they had been a professor for three years.

He also limited the percentage of staff that could be foreign to 2% to restrict unwanted international influence.

A prolonged series of protests broke out at Bogazici University in January 2021 after Erdogan went further, appointing Melih Bulu, a founding member of his own party’s Sariyer district branch and former deputy chairman of the AKP’s Istanbul provincial chapter, as rector.

Bulu was eventually dismissed but the protests are continuing because he was replaced by his deputy, Professor Dr Naci Inci, by presidential decree despite a 95% disapproval rating he received in polls held among the university community to determine possible rector candidates, according to the Stockholm Center for Freedom.

Existential battle to reshape Turkey

Like Atatürk, Erdogan has built his own cult of personality. But his aim is to reshape the Turkish state and society into a more overtly Muslim country and his enemies are those who do not share his or the AKP’s conservative vision.

It is an existential battle to shift power from the Western-oriented secular republican elite based in the cities to a new elite drawn from the mass of current and formerly rural religiously minded conservatives, many of whom come from rural families or families more recently drawn to the cities from their rural roots, who mostly support AKP.

The tools he uses against academics are those of illiberal democracies (restrictions on free speech, firing of academics, controls on management, restrictions on travel for academics, targeting nationals in foreign universities for sedition) and authoritarian regimes (limits on or censorship of social criticism, ministerial controls of university leaderships and faculty hires and advancement, arrest of academics for sedition).

Universities, once a symbol and vehicle for a modern Turkey, are now a place of suppression and party control. As the Scholars at Risk report, Free to Think 2018, stated, for years Turkey has suffered from a “state campaign of debilitating attacks on the freedom to think, question and share ideas”.

With tens of thousands of academics and students forced out of universities or put in jail and thousands of academics dismissed by decree, the productivity of Turkey’s universities has been damaged – there was an 11.5% reduction in peer-reviewed journal articles between 2016 and 2017 for instance – and with the relentless pressure to self-sensor, pluralist democracy has been undermined.

As long as Erdogan remains in power, it is difficult to see how universities can provide the critical thought and innovations that Turkey needs. Perhaps that is exactly what Erdogan wants.

Brendan O’Malley is editor in chief of University World News. He has contributed two chapters to John Aubrey Douglass’s new book, Neo-Nationalism and Universities: Populists, autocrats and the future of higher education, published by Johns Hopkins University Press and as an open access book accessible via Project Muse.

There are two forthcoming events in which chapter contributors discuss their findings: Tuesday 12 October, 9.30am to 10.30am PDT – Neo-Nationalism and Universities: Turkey, Hungary and the EU. Moderator: John Aubrey Douglass. Participants: Brendan O’Malley, Wilhelm Krull, Marijk van der Wende. Details can be found here. Also on Wednesday 20 October, 11am to 12pm PDT – Neo-Nationalism and Universities: China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Russia. Moderator: John Aubrey Douglass. Participants: Karin Fischer, Bryan Penprase and Igor Chirikov. Details can be found here.

This article is the third in a series using excerpts from the new book. The previous three articles are “How to stop neo-nationalist leaders subduing universities”, “Under attack: universities and neo-nationalist movements” and “When are universities leaders or followers?”. A recent book launch event co-sponsored by University World News is now posted on YouTube.