Letter to Turkish PM Davutoglu Concerning Academic Facing Criminal Indictment for “Terrorist Propaganda” and Praising 'Crime and Criminals' Due to a Final Exam Question

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Nov 6, 2015 Turkey
Letter to Turkish PM Davutoglu Concerning Academic Facing Criminal Indictment for “Terrorist Propaganda” and Praising 'Crime and Criminals' Due to a Final Exam Question

Letter to Turkish PM Davutoglu Concerning Academic Facing Criminal Indictment for “Terrorist Propaganda” and Praising 'Crime and Criminals' Due to a Final Exam Question

By : Committee on Academic Freedom (MESA)

[The following letter was issued by the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association on 3 November 2015]

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu
Office of the Prime Minister
Başbakanlık
06573 Ankara, Turkey
Via facsimile +90 312 417 0476

Dear Prime Minister Davutoğlu:

I write on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) of North America and its Committee on Academic Freedom in order to express our serious concern over reports that Barış Ünlü, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Ankara University, has been prosecuted on the grounds that he was engaged in “terrorist propaganda” and had praised “crime and criminals.” In an alarming case of violation of academic freedom, the indictment bases its allegations on a final exam Barış Ünlü gave in his course “Political Life and Institutions in Turkey” in January 2015 and presents his exam questions as evidence. The message of the indictment suggests that even the academic study of the Kurdish movement has now been criminalized by the Turkish government.

MESA was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has nearly 3000 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

For his course on political institutions and life in Turkey, Barış Ünlü assigned texts by Abdullah Öcalan, the incarcerated leader of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) as part of his curriculum. In his final exam, he asked students to compare two texts written by Abdullah Öcalan in terms of his engagement with colonialism, the nation state, revolutionary violence, and democracy. The texts in question were Öcalan’s 1978 brochure entitled The Path to the Revolution of Kürdistan/Manifesto and his 2012 article entitled “Democratic modernity as a means to build a new system in the Middle East.” Barış Ünlü also asked his students to consider the changes in the Kurdish movement and society, in Turkey and globally, during those 34 years in responding to the exam question.

The indictment provides a brief analysis of the texts to draw the conclusion that the PKK has remained a terrorist organization that has not changed in 34 years. The indictment further asserts that Abdullah Öcalan constitutes a threat to Turkish national security, and that Professor Ünlü’s exam question served to brainwash students by legitimizing Öcalan and presenting him as a political leader. In short, the indictment conflates the use of texts for critical examination in an academic curriculum with engaging in terrorist propaganda. Further, if presenting Öcalan as a political figure is treated as a basis for criminal investigation, the government runs the risk of effectively criminalizing all academics, students, journalists and political organizers working on Kurdish issues.

In addition, the indictment enumerates incidents that occurred on Ankara University’s campus allegedly as a result of provocations by PKK or KCK affiliated students. The indictment alleges that classes had to be canceled on 21-22 March 2013, 9 October 2014, and 24-25 March 2015 as a consequence of disruptions by pro-Kurdish students. The indictment goes on to claim that these incidents demonstrate that the campus was under threat from pro-Kurdish activists and describes Barış Ünlü’s class as a provocation in this context. Yet independent media reports cast doubt on the version of events presented in the indictment. Further, the indictment does not even purport to show a direct connection between Professor Ünlü’s course and these incidents.

There are at least two distressing facets to your government’s actions in this case. First, using the content of a final exam question as a basis to prosecute a professor represents a clear violation of academic freedom. The content of Professor Ünlü’s political science course does not constitute a legitimate basis for criminal inquiry. Further, the attempt to attribute responsibility to Ünlü’s course for tensions around the Kurdish question on Ankara University’s campus is to ignore the political reality of polarization around these and other issues in contemporary Turkey.

The second troubling aspect of the indictment concerns its timing. At the time that Professor Ünlü was offering his course, peace negotiations were underway between government officials and Abdullah Öcalan himself. This peace process was unilaterally terminated by the Turkish government at the end of July 2015 following a suicide bombing, apparently by ISIS, in Suruç, Turkey that caused the deaths of over 30 pro-Kurdish peace activists. What has followed is a Turkish government campaign targeting those aligned with the victims in the Suruç attack rather than the perpetrators. Indeed, since this summer the government has launched military action in the Kurdish provinces of Turkey and created a permissive climate for private acts of anti-Kurdish violence, culminating in attacks on pro-Kurdish politicians, media offices and ultimately another suicide bombing at a pro-Kurdish peace demonstration killing over one hundred people in a central area of Ankara. The timing of the indictment against Professor Ünlü—which was initiated nine months after the final examination in question—makes it appear to be an extension of the government’s broader campaign against Kurdish and pro-Kurdish activists, politicians, media and their supporters.

As a member state of the Council of Europe and a signatory of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, Turkey is required to protect freedom of thought, expression and assembly. Further, Turkey is also a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), all of which protect the rights to freedom of opinion, expression and association, which are at the heart of academic freedom. These rights are also enshrined in articles 25-27 of the Turkish Constitution. We urge your government to take all necessary steps to ensure that these rights are protected.

We respectfully ask that your government take immediate steps to drop the charges against Barış Ünlü. We also continue to urge you to take note of mounting international condemnation of the erosion of democratic rights and freedoms in Turkey.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.  I look forward to your positive response.
 

Sincerely,

\"\"

Nathan Brown

President, Middle East Studies Association

Professor, George Washington University

 

cc:

  • Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Cumhurbaşkanı, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Turkish president) 
  • Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi Başkanı, İsmet Yılmaz (President of the Turkish National Assembly) 
  • Türkiye Adalet Bakanı, Kenan İpek (Turkish Justice Minister)
  • Türkiye Yüksek Öğretim Kurulu (YÖK) Başkanı, Yekta Saraç (President of the Turkish Higher Education Council)
  • Vice-Chair of the European Parliament Subcommittee on Human Rights, Barbara Lochbihler 
  • Member of the Cabinet of Federica Mogherini, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Monika Kacinskiene
  • Commissioner for European Neighborhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, Johannes Hahn
  • Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, Nils Muižnieks
Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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