Dear Sir / Madam,
As part of the Erdogan-AKP regime’s massive purge policy since the abortive July 15 coup, a total of 130,000 employees have been either barred (50,000) or suspended (80,000) from public service with emergency rule decrees. This policy has been carried out with the pretext of removing the putschist Gulenist cadres from public offices. Certainly, anybody who has taken part in the July 15 coup attempt should be properly investigated and punished under the rule of law. However, the government’s massive purge has taken the form of a partisan and blanket punishment of all of its opponents in public and political life. We view this blanket purge policy to be a gross crackdown on civil, political and economic rights enshrined in the Constitution and international conventions, on the right to work, in particular.
The scope of this crackdown was recently expanded to include academics and schoolteachers critical of the Erdogan-AKP regime’s repressive anti-Kurdish policies. These purges were carried out with the Government Decree No. 672. On 1 September 2016, 41 Academics for Peace were banned from public service along with 28,163 teachers and staff with alleged ties to the Gulen organization. The case of 1,128 Academics For Peace, who were subjected to a smear campaign and persecution for a peace petition they had signed in January 2016 in critique of Erdoğan-AKP regime’s militaristic policies in the Kurdish region, had become an emblem of the authoritarian witch-hunting of any critical voice for a peaceful resolution of the Kurdish issue. For months until the failed July 15 putsch, Peace Academics were targeted with legal and disciplinary proceedings charging them with the hype of “supporting PKK terror.” Hundreds of them lost their jobs. Now, the government is abusing the pretext of “Gulenist terror” to further penalize Peace Academics, and block the venues of critical research and speech on the Kurdish issue.
The coupling of Erdogan regime’s blanket purges with its militant anti-Kurdish policy took on a more dramatic character with a sequel to Government Decree No. 672. On 8 September, 11.300 primary and secondary schoolteachers were suspended from duty for their alleged ties to “terrorist organizations.” Of these, 9,843 (%87) are members of the Union of Education and Science Workers (Eğitim-Sen); a trade union which defends democracy, pluralism and secularism in education, and which has received the brunt of successive governments’ anti-Kurdish policies since the 1990s for its advocacy for education in mother tongue. The government targets Eğitim-Sen members as “teachers of PKK,” also announcing that thousands more of schoolteachers in the Kurdish region will be suspended.
The suspension of Eğitim-Sen members from duty as a continuation of AKP government’s crackdown on Kurdish parliamentarians, local governments, journalists, and activists not only constitutes a gross breach of their right to work, but also carries forward a strong threat to all teachers and other civil servants in the Kurdish region. The government means to declare: If you do not comply with my monist and Kurdish-denialist “one nation, one religion, one language” national-security teaching, I will condemn you to unemployment, poverty, and social death.
This purge in the area of education carried out one week before the start of the school year also needs to be viewed as a crackdown on the right to education of hundreds of thousands of students, especially in the Kurdish region, where more than 9000 schoolteachers have been suspended, 4,314 of whom being based in the city of Diyarbakir alone. After the systematic obstruction of education throughout the last school year due to months-long military curfews across the Kurdish region, Kurdish children are now being penalized with dismissal of their teachers.
We would like to emphasize that depriving citizens of their right to work as partisan punishment for political difference, prior to any effective investigation, fair trial and defense mechanism, is a shortcut means of hindering the exercise of their myriad civil, socio-economic, and political rights. No doubt, this will create hard-to-remedy mass grievances that would hit back Turkey’s already politically fragmented population with ever-grown adversities and conflicts. Closing universities to free research and speech on Kurdish issue, scapegoating peace scholars and intellectuals, punishing advocacy for pluralist and secular education in mother tongue, and depriving Kurdish children of their right to education would only further preempt the possibilities for peaceful coexistence in the country based on values of democracy, peace, and justice.
With this understanding and sense of urgency, we hereby call upon all international governance institutions, human rights organizations as well as labor and educational activists to invite the AKP government stop its illegal blanket purges and increasingly more violent Kurdish policy carried out under the pretext of fighting the putschist threat. We invite you all to stand in strong solidarity with the dignified struggles of Peace Academics and Egitim-Sen teachers for reinstatement into their jobs with full recovery of their employee rights.
Yours sincerely,
Selahattin Demirtaş Figen Yüksekdağ
HDP Co-Chair HDP Co-Chair