Fired Turkish academics take protest to the streets

PanARMENIAN.Net - In the heart of Ankara, Turkish communications lecturer Sevilay Celenk gives a lecture to dozens of attentive students.

But her lecture is not taking place on a campus, or even in a hall, but at a park, where the crowd has braced the bitter cold to hear her.

Celenk is one of about 5,000 Turkish academics who have been dismissed under a controversial state of emergency imposed after the failed July 15 coup.

In a show of defiance across parks in Ankara, fired academics provide free lessons once every two weeks, lecturing on various topics including class and identity, AFP reports.

Since the coup attempt which tried to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, over 100,000 people have been sacked or suspended from the public sector under emergency decrees.

The university sector has been one of the hardest hit, with many lecturers accused of havings links to US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara has blamed for the coup attempt, and also to Kurdish militants.

Celenk said that when she was dismissed in one of the emergency decrees on January 6, she felt anger at what she called a "frightening removal of any democratic, dissident, leftwing" sections of society.

She says she has been targeted because she signed a petition along with over 2,000 other academics calling for peace in Turkey's restive southeast.

Among the 330 academics dismissed earlier this month, 115 had signed the petition, local media reported.

AFP has been told that no faculty at Ankara University will be shut down and that each department was finding replacements.

The government has insisted that any mistakes will be rectified, and last month a decree was issued to set up a commission to assess appeals from people who claim they were wrongly suspended or fired.

Many dismissed teachers and lecturers are members of the leading leftwing education union, Egitim-Sen, whose president, Kamuran Karaca, said nearly 1,300 people it represents had been sacked.

Another 11,500 members were suspended last year but Karaca said all but around 70 people had been returned to their posts.

He denied that his secular union -- which is financially supporting its sacked members -- had any militant or Gulen links.

Karaca said the union would apply to the new commission to appeal the dismissals.

But Andrew Gardner, a researcher on Turkey at Amnesty International, said he was sceptical about the commission's ability -- or desire -- to examine cases quickly.

"Preventing people from going to the European Court of Human Rights seems to be the primary objective," he said.