Sacked Turkish academics take protest to the 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 havings 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 Jan 6, she felt anger at what she called a “frightening removal of any democratic, dissident, leftwing” sections of society.
“I felt a healthy anger, because we are faced with a truly unjust, illegal and unfounded dismissal,” she told AFP after her latest outdoor lecture to an audience including former students, on the concept of resistance.
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.
Among the 330 academics dismissed earlier this month, 115 had signed the petition, local media reported.
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