Turkey’s Jailed Students Need Our Attention

Turkey’s Jailed Students Need Our Attention

Turkey’s Jailed Students Need Our Attention

By : Sinem Adar and Gülay Türkmen

On March 19, 2018, a group of students from the Society for Islamic Research (BISAK) at Istanbul’s Boğaziçi University opened a stand at the campus to distribute sweets (lokum/Turkish delight) to commemorate Turkish soldiers killed in Turkey’s capture of the northern Syrian town of Afrin. In response, a group of anti-war students staged a peaceful demonstration, carrying banners that read “No Delight for Invasion and Massacre”, and “The Palace Wants War, the People Demand Peace”. A short-lived tension erupted between the groups.

 

The next day, the youth branch of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) organized a protest in front of the campus and read aloud a press statement that described the pro-war students as “patriots” and the anti-war students as “terrorists”. In follow-up statements, both the Presidency of Boğaziçi University and the Presidency of Higher Education Council (YÖK) criticized the anti-war students for reacting in “unacceptable and disrespectful” ways. 

On March 22, police raided students’ houses and dormitories and detained six students. The next day, hundreds of students gathered on campus to protest the detention of their friends. When students started chanting slogans, the police detained five more of them by dragging them along the ground. As a result, one student had their nose broken. According to one of the detained students who was released, students were assaulted in the police car as well.

The next day, the youth branch of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) organized a protest in front of the campus and read aloud a press statement that described the pro-war students as 'patriots' and the anti-war students as 'terrorists.'

On March 23 and 24, President Erdoğan called the anti-war students “communist, terrorist youth” and the pro-war students “pious, national, local youth.” He added that they had launched an investigation into the “terrorist youth” as “universities are not supposed to raise terrorists”, and that these students will not be given “the right to continue their education at this university.” He also threatened the faculty by cautioning them to be careful about their relations with such students. Following Erdogan’s speech, on March 25, there was another police raid on campus and three more students were detained from houses and dormitories. As of writing (April 3) the public prosecutor demanded the arrest of 16 students who have been in detention at the Police Headquarters in Istanbul, and 9 students were sent to jail later during the day on charges of terrorist propaganda. 

The arrest of Boğaziçi University students is the latest manifestation of an alarming pattern. By the end of 2016, the total number of students in jail was 69,301. Of these, only 35,647 continue their education while the remaining 33,364 are registered at an institution of education but can not actively continue their education. A state of emergency decree that was legislated in November 2016 (decree #677) forbids students jailed on terrorism charges from taking exams.  

In today’s Turkey, all institutions that are supposedly the guarantee of critical thought and free speech are under siege. Between the coup attempt in July 2016 and March 2018, 4,463 judges and prosecutors have been dismissed; 189 media outlets have been shut down; 319 journalists have been arrested. By 17 February 2017, 1583 associations had been  shut down. Only 182 of these were later re-opened. By the end of 2017, 5,822 academics had been dismissed from 118 public universities.

On 27 October 2017, Osman Kavala, who is one of the highly prominent and influential figures of civil society in Turkey, was arrested on charges of trying to overthrow the government and constitutional order. Since then, he has been incarcerated and is still waiting for an indictment.  

On 21 March 2018, the sale of Dogan Medya, Turkey’s largest media group, to the Demiroren group, one of the pro-government conglomerates, was announced. This sale jeopardizes the distribution of opposition papers and the jobs of many journalists. It also means increased government control over mainstream media as 73% of Turkish newspapers is now owned by pro-government conglomerates.

With the shrinking of the judiciary, media, non-governmental associations, and universities, the possibility of critical thinking and freedom of speech, the two pillars of a democratic society, increasingly diminishes. This is why the latest arrest of the students should not be underestimated. Standing beside these jailed students at this critical moment is vital. It means protecting the right to peaceful demonstration, the right to disagree with domestic and foreign policy choices, the right to free speech, and last, but not least, the right to education. It means protecting whatever is left of the spaces that guarantee plural, equal, and inclusionary citizenship.

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412