Sacked Turkish academics take protest to streets

Ankara: In the heart of Ankara, Turkish communications lecturer Sevilay Celenk gives a lecture to dozens of attentive students.

But her lecture is not taking place on a campus, or even in a hall, but at a park, where the crowd has braced the bitter cold to hear her.

Celenk is one of about 5,000 Turkish academics who have been dismissed under a controversial state of emergency imposed after the failed July 15 coup.

In a show of defiance across parks in Ankara, fired academics provide free lessons once every two weeks, lecturing on various topics, including class and identity.

Since the coup attempt which tried to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, over 100,000 people have been sacked or suspended from the public sector under emergency decrees.

The university sector has been one of the hardest hit, with many lecturers accused of having links to US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara has blamed for the coup attempt, and also to Kurdish militants.

Celenk said that when she was dismissed in one of the emergency decrees on January 6, she felt anger at what she called a “frightening removal of any democratic, dissident, leftwing” sections of society.

She says she has been targeted because she signed a petition along with over 2,000 other academics calling for peace in Turkey’s restive southeast.

Ibrahim Kaboglu, a prominent specialist on constitutional law, was also among the latest to be sacked.

“They took away our right to education, to schooling. It’s a frightening process. It’s like they are trying to pour concrete on our school,” Ilkyaz Gencdal, a former student of Celenk’s at Ankara University, told AFP after the 15-minute lecture.

AFP has been told that no faculty at Ankara University will be shut down and that each department was finding replacements.

The government has insisted that any mistakes will be rectified, and last month a decree was issued to set up a commission to assess appeals from people who claim they were wrongly suspended or fired.

But the education ministry told AFP it would not comment on individual cases.

Nuriye Gulmen was suspended last year from her job as lecturer at Selcuk University in the central Turkish province of Konya, and formally sacked in January.

Since November, she has been standing every day by an Ankara statue of a woman that celebrates human rights.

Gulmen has been detained 23 times by the police during her nearly 100-day protest.

“Until today, wherever there has been success for workers and the public — if they have won rights — they have won this on the street,” Gulmen said.

Her next move will be to go on hunger strike until she can return to her work.