MEDIA LINE
Erdoğan’s Next Target to Muzzle: Turkey’s Academics
by Nick Ashdown
January 31, 2016

The Turkish government’s latest target in its campaign to silence critical voices is the country’s academics. Many of the 2,212 Turkish academics who signed a strongly-worded letter calling for peace in Turkey’s embattled southeast have been fired, detained, investigated, harassed by nationalists, and attacked by the country’s largely pro-government media.“I knew it could create some kind of controversy, but in no way did I expect it to create this kind of [response],” Halil Yenigün, an assistant professor of political theory at Istanbul Commerce University who signed the letter, told The Media Line. Immediately after President Erdoğan cursed the signatories as “colonialists,” “traitors,” and “enemies of the state,” prosecutors launched investigations and universities fired or suspended many of them. READ MORE