“Turkey
is incarcerating its academics!” This is what Tuna Altinel (University
of Lyon 1, France) wrote to the European solidarity networks last
Wednesday (8th of May 2019), as Füsun Üstel stepped into the women’s
prison in Eskişehir. A retired political science professor from
Galatasaray University, Füsun Üstel is one of the 2237 signatories of
the peace petition published in January 2016, that denounced the Turkish
state’s violation of civilians’ basic rights in the Kurdish cities of
Turkey. Since then, more than a third of the Academics for Peace have
been prosecuted, on the grounds of “terrorist propaganda”. The outcome
of the trials has invariably been a jail sentence. However, until
recently, the indicted academics were sentenced to a maximum of two
years in prison with a suspension provision, provided they refrained
from committing further “crimes” over the following five years.
Füsun
Üstel refused this provision because she did not want to be condemned
to silence. That is the reason why she is now behind bars. Other
academics are likely to face a similar treatment soon: nine of them
followed her example and are awaiting their judgment on appeal. But
there is more: in December 2018, Gencay Gürsoy was sentenced to 27-month
imprisonment. Gürsoy is the former president of the Turkish Medical
Association and a well-known activist of the fight for human rights in
Turkey. As such, he was not judged for terrorist propaganda but for
“insulting the Turkish people, the Republic of Turkey, the state
institutions and the government”. Since then, several dozen academics
have like him been sentenced to more than 24 months in jail, which means
that the suspension provision is no longer an option. Furthermore,
eleven members of the steering committee of the Union of Turkish
Physicians have just been sentenced to 20 month-imprisonment for
declaring, when Afrin was invaded in January 2018, that “war is a public
health issue”
The last episode in the relentless expansion of arbitrary practices and crushing repression took place this Saturday, 11th of
May, when Tuna Altinel, a mathematician who has been an associate
professor at the Claude BernardUniversity of Lyon 1 and a French
resident since 1996, was put in jail. Tuna is Turkish and has a Turkish
passport which was confiscated at Istanbul airport last month, when he
travelled to Turkey to visit his family over the Easter break. During
his trial as an academic for peace, Tuna had refused to disavow the
peace petition. Indeed, when asked whether he agreed with its
content, he had responded that he had arrived at the same assessments as
those contained in the declaration during his stays in the region, and
that he actually had had a lived experience in Nusaybin and Cizre of
what the declaration describes as if he was the author.
The
official grounds provided for his incarceration today are that he took
part in an event organised in Lyon on the 21stof February 2019 by an
association of solidarity with Kurdish people, which an MP in exile,
from opposition party HDP and from the city of Cizre, was also
attending. During that event, a documentary was shown with scenes of the
massacres committed by the Turkish security forces in Cizre after the
electoral defeat of the ruling party AKP on the 7th of June 2015, i.e.
the very massacres that motivated the peace petition.
Of
course, academics are not the only ones under attack in Turkey:
journalists, lawyers, civil servants are also targeted. But, through
Füsun Üstel’s and Tuna Altinel’s incarceration, the Turkish state is
punishing the refusal to bend to its arbitrary pronouncements and to
submit to its parody of justice. We declare our solidarity with Füsun
Üstel and Tuna Altinel, and with all the signatories of the peace
petition who currently live under threat, and we call on all
Universities in the UK and the EU and their federations, as well as on
the EU institutions, to intervene and demand the immediate release of
our incarcerated colleagues, as well as the end of state repression in
Turkey.
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