“Either all together, or none of us” say dozens of students in the snowy courtyard outside the office of the newly appointed Rector at the famous Bogazici (Bosphorus) University in Istanbul. Every day a group of students and academics are outside the office of Melik Bulu, who was appointed by presidential decree earlier this year by Tayyip Erdogan to the post of Rector, without meeting – as they say – the necessary qualifications.
Despite violent police crackdowns and hundreds of student arrests across Turkey for more than 40 days, students in Bogacici say they will protest daily until Boulou leaves. “We want an elected and not an appointed Rector”, “No to a rector”, are some of their slogans while in the MKD there are hashtags “Bogazici's resistance”, “Solidarity in Bogazici”, “We will not look down”.
Students in Ankara, Izmir and other Turkish cities take to the streets to express support for and opposition to the presidential appointments. On Bogazici's side are students at European universities, such as the Sorbonne.
Boulou was a former AKP MP candidate who failed to get elected, a former AKP mayoral candidate in Istanbul's Atasehir district where he also failed to get elected, and by presidential decree he was previously appointed rector of three other – at least – his universities.
The Turkish executive called Bogazici's students snakes, terrorists, lazy, LGBT students “perverted”. Wood, chemicals, arrests and extraditions even from their homes, interrogations without clothes.
Nikos Moudouros, Lecturer at the Department of Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cyprus explains to KYPE what is happening, why and what the consequences are.
Appointments by presidential decrees
The appointments of rectors began in 1982 under Kenan Evren, Mr. Moudouros explains. The rectors were then elected by the universities and the three most prominent were presented to the President, at whose discretion and that of the Higher Education Council (YÖK), was the final choice of appointment. A strong position of Erdogan and AKP since 2015 was that the electoral processes in the universities should be abolished and they should be governed by a business model, he added.
After the coup attempt in 2016 and the imposition of a state of emergency in Turkey, the right to electoral procedures in universities was abolished by decree, which now became law with the constitutional change of 2018, Mr. Moudouros noted, recalling that even then there were reactions, more sporadic .
Erdogan wants to reproduce his ideological and political program through smaller structures and powers, said Moudouros, and Melih Boulou is one of the most classic examples of this demand of the Turkish President. “Boulou's only relationship with this university is that he is a graduate of it. “If one studies his political positions, in addition to being an organic member of the AKP, it seems to express the view that universities should be an arm of Erdogan's central government, not to function as academic institutions, but to adapt to market needs.” .
Why at Bogazici University
This university, said Nikos Moudouros, has a long history, international presence of its academic staff, high admission score and despite the fact that it is now attended by young people from Anatolia – not just the elite of Istanbul – the Turkish government deliberately he cultivated the myth of the frothy students of the secular elite and a privileged university, which is not productive but parasitic and absorbs the value, profit and production of the rest of society.
It is the way, he explained, that Tayyip Erdogan treats every sector of society that does not embrace his own politics and ideology. The Bogazici University, according to the Turkish President, should be subordinated as the arm of power that reproduces its political-ideological program to the student youth and the academic community.
Police and verbal violence against students
As the reactions spread to the society, so does the police violence, Mr. Moudouros observes, noting that the police is now a central ideological institution of the new regime. For Kemalism the mechanism of repression of social movements was the army, for Erdogan's new Turkey it is the police, he added, which is now composed and places a “religious-conservative power structure”.
The 2020 budgets strengthened its structures and responsibilities, he said, while a recent bill includes a clause on the use of military means for police purposes whenever it deems fit. “The use of force now seems to be adopted as an anti-opposition policy”
Asked to comment on the rhetoric from the authorities against the students, Mr. Moudouros said that the members of the social opposition are considered for Erdogan's new Turkey “out of the nation”. They do not conform to what power defines as national values: adherence to religion, state power, its leader and the family as the ideological nucleus of the state, he said. “It simply came to our notice then. “Turkey is worth every sacrifice for the survival of the state. Turkey is threatened not only from abroad but mainly from within, according to Tayyip Erdogan.”
Asked if there is a domino effect of the student reactions, Nikos Moudouros answered in the affirmative, saying that it is important how these reactions in various universities in Turkey will be joined by the labor strikes that are currently underway but do not see the light of day. . He noted that strikes are now taking place in factories in central cities of the Islamic movement, such as Kayseri, Caesarea.
“It is a period of intense social movements in Turkey that used to be more easily suppressed due to the state of emergency. Now, due to the pandemic and economic destabilization, these movements are re-emerging. But we do not know how big they can reach in the next period “.
Evren's Erdogan
Tayyip Erdogan, Mr. Moudouros said, is one of the results of Evren's policy in the 1980s that opened the gates to the then-Islamic movement, which was not only considered mainstream, but a structural part of Turkey's overall identity.
He assessed that Erdogan “inherited” three positions of Evren politics: the appointment of rectors – without even elections in his own government – the position that a strong state, and therefore a strong Turkey, is identified with how centralized and powerful the central government is and The disputed election results with the appointment of State Commissioners (Kayyum = administrator), which began in 2014 in Kurdish areas to suppress the Kurdish movement and extended after the coup to the reorganization of Fethullah Gulen's operations in Turkey.
We see Kayyum now in the universities as well, said Mr. Moudouros, paralleling the practice with what happened in the occupied areas with the KEE, the election – finally without a rival – of Ersan Saner in the presidency of the party and then in the “prime minister”.
