Hundreds of Academics Declare their Support to METU

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Nov 11, 2013 Turkey
[METU students planting new trees on campus. Photo via solidaritywithmetu.blogspot.com] [METU students planting new trees on campus. Photo via solidaritywithmetu.blogspot.com]

Hundreds of Academics Declare their Support to METU

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[This statement was released on 6 November 2013. It has been lightly edited for stylistic purposes.]

Hundreds of academic across the world have shown their solidarity with Middle East Technical University (METU) in its fight against the unlawful and destructive highway construction project passing through the campus forest. There are 857 signatories from 278 academic institutions and twenty-six different countries.

The statement emphasizes that METU resistance has turned into a fight for environmental rights, freedom of speech, and higher education autonomy: “We, the undersigned academics, condemn the unlawful environmental massacre and the police brutality in the Middle East Technical University campus. It is an unethical and unacceptable attack on METU as well as the academia in Turkey. We declare our full support and solidarity with all resisting METU students, academic personnel and staff.” Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Immanuel Wallerstein, Etienne Balibar, Asef Bayat, Jean Comaroff, Arturo Escobar, Michael Herzfeld, Anna Tsing, Cihan Tuğal, Erik Swyngedouw, and Vijay Prashad are among the signatories.

Noam Chomsky, widely known linguist and philosopher, has also made an individual statement of support in addition to becoming a signatory of the statement:

I would like to express my support for the protest of the METU Senate against the night-time raid launched by Ankara Metropolitan Municipality as part of the destructive highway project. I would also like to add my voice to those protesting the police violence against students that followed.

The plan to construct the highway passing through the campus forest was first introduced in 1992. It generated huge opposition from the METU students and was suspended. Another version of the plan was reintroduced by Ankara Metropolitan Municipality mayor Melih Gokcek. Recently, due to his insistence on the project, the debates around the highway construction heated up through strong opposition from the METU students and staff, as well as residents of the 100.Yil and Cigdem neighborhoods. While these debates and the legal process of planning were still ongoing, Metropolitan Municipality conducted a night-raid at the METU campus right before a long holiday on 18 October 2013 to make sure the number of students at campus was at its minimum. Metropolitan demolition teams committed an environmental massacre by cutting down three thousand trees overnight. In the following days, police violence against the METU students exacerbated the situation, which included the excessive use of tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets.

This unlawful and unethical attack on METU has brought over eight hundred academics together around the same cause. Academics agree on the fact that METU’s fight for its forest is also a fight for its democratic right to protest and to exercise its freedom of speech.

The full statement can be found here. More information on what is happening at METU can be found below.

***

What Is Going on in METU, Ankara?*

Once again, the neighborhood forums and the university come together in the face of environmental destruction and the violation of university autonomy. The efforts to peacefully oppose a road construction project on Middle East Technical University campus turned into a battle for dignity, environmental protection, and the right to protest. The essence of the highway project and the ways in which protests against it were handled are reflections of a certain political agenda pursued by the government. It is another attempt to reconfigure higher education in line with the AKP`s construction of political hegemony in Turkey. Putting these attempts into a context, we explain what the METU forest represents; how the controversy on the highway project started; and how and why it faces such strong resistance from METU faculty, students, and workers. 

The METU Forest

The Middle East Technical University (METU) was founded in 1956 in an area of 4,500 hectares. The forestation was launched in 1961, when students, academics, and citizens of Ankara, as well as some politicians, participated in the festivals. More than thirty-one million trees were planted, creating a vast green area in the steppes of Ankara. These trees were considered as a heritage of METU workers and academics. The forest encompasses a region of 3,100 hectares and was declared a Natural and Archaeological Conservation Site in 1995 by the Ministry of Culture. According to the website of the METU Forestation and Environment Directory, the forest accommodates one hundred species under the threat of extinction in the Middle Anatolian flora and fauna. This natural ecosystem is home to many wild animals (including wolves, foxes, partridges, rabbits, snakes, and turtles), some 140 bird species, as well as various fish and other marine species living in the lakes and lagoons. The presence of the forest created a micro-climate effect in the region, made the urban climate milder, and put a barrier to unplanned urbanization in the south of Ankara city. The METU Forestation Project won the International Aga Khan Architecture Award (1995) and the TEMA Foundation Award (2003).[1]

The Highway Project

Construction of the highway passing through the METU campus was first introduced to the municipal agenda in 1992. This road was supposed to connect Anadolu Boulevard to Konya Road. The project was approved in 1994, and not surprisingly, was responded to by massive student demonstrations. In addition, the METU campus was declared as protected area in 1995.

In 2008, the Metropolitan Municipality, governed by Melih Gökçek (who has been in office for the last nineteen years, and is well known for jumping to and from right-wing parties taking part in the government during this period), introduced a second alternative for the road construction. This project initiated strong debate between the Municipality and METU. The Municipality claimed that the buildings on METU campus were illegal, and decided to demolish forty-five buildings as well as to fine the university a total of 1.8 million TL (approximately 600,000 Euros, or 900,000 USD). The issue was publicly known as “the road showdown.”

The METU administration brought the project to trial. The court decided, as a result of forty-five court hearings, that neither the demolitons nor the fine had any legal grounds and that these were against the public interest. Following the objections of the Metropolitan Municipality, a team consisting of two academics from the Urban Planning Department and five academics from the Civil Engineering Department started working on a new plan. The title of this new plan was “Reconstruction Project for Protection.” According to this plan, the essentials of the first highway route approved in 1994 would be kept as they were, with many additional crossroads proposals. The plan further stated that, in order to avoid environmental damage, the second highway should be constructed as a tunnel.[2]

The Occupation and the Resistance

Students, academics and workers of METU think that this highway serves only political and economic interests. As a matter of fact, if the intention was to relieve city traffic, the municipality should have finished the metro construction that has been ongoing for eleven years already. METU has witnessed protests and forestation actions for years, opposing the destruction. METU students, together with the locals of 100. Yıl and Çiğdem neighborhoods, have organized protests, demonstrations, and recently, have camped in the proposed project site. The municipality responded to the protests with police violence, including tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets.

While the METU administration mobilized all legal procedures, the gains achieved by court decisions were overruled in practice due to political interests. On 18 October 2013, the last day of the religious holidays due to the Feast of Sacrifice, when the number of students on campus was at its minimum, demolition workers entered the campus, accompanied by police forces. The next day, METU students, graduates, and workers gathered to protest the night raid, and neighbors from 100.Yıl and Çiğdem joined them in support. Police laid an ambush inside the forest, attacking the protesters with tear gas canisters and rubber bullets. While barricades were formed and police violence continued all night long, it was reported that policemen beat a student and threw him into the fire next to the barricades. The student is diagnosed to have second-degree burns.

After the removal of three thousand trees, the METU Presidency released a statement:

We communicated to the Ministry, Municipality, and State authorities on 11 September 2013, that we were planning to object to their plans, and emphasized that irreversible practices should be avoided in the meanwhile. Ankara Metropolitan Municipality`s (AMM) Director of Techical Works and Director of Construction Affairs stated that no action will be taken without discussing with the university administration. On the same day, a written appeal was sent to AMM to declare that we do not assent to any actions until the legal suspension and objection periods finalize.

Despite of these meetings and correspondences, an abrupt night operation was executed on 18 October 2013, without waiting for the suspension and objection periods to end. Construction machines, construction workers and many municipality employees intruded the university land on 18 October 2013, Friday, at 21:15, without any permission, and by destroying the campus fences on the side of 100.Yıl district Öğretmenler Boulevard. Private security guards of the university tried to warn and stop the teams, as university land cannot be trespassed without permission from the administration. However, it turned impossible to prevent the numerous trucks, construction machines and municipality workers from entering the campus without permission.

…

In the morning of 19 October 2013, an examination established that the road route inside the METU campus was completely cleaned and all the trees were removed. We are not informed about how three thousand trees (including more than six hundred pine trees that were supposed to be transferred) were removed. Yet, it is impossible to transfer six hundred trees in a single night.

Mayor Melih Gökçek`s agenda is to incite provocation to consolidate his voters before the upcoming local elections in March 2014. In this respect, his objective is very similar to Tayyip Erdoğan`s motivation during the Gezi Park protests, at a local level. Moreover, this is a direct attack to the integrity of METU as a university, as well as the values METU represents in the society. METU students continue their resistance today. Their candid struggle with environmental concerns is exemplified by the amazing tree planting action during which over three thousand trees were planted in the same area. 

Subsequently, hundreds of academics around the world have shown their support to METU through a statement: "We, the undersigned academics, condemn the unlawful environmental massacre and the police brutality in the Middle East Technical University campus. It is an unethical and unacceptable attack on METU as well as the academia in Turkey. We declare our full support and solidarity with all resisting METU students, academic personnel and staff." 

As the motto goes: “There is only one road passing through METU, and that is the road to revolution.”

* This article is mainly based on an online article written by Out for Beyond:

[1] For more information, see here.

[2] Information presented in these paragraphs is mainly based on this article [Turkish].
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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