Human Rights in Turkey: Assaults on Human Dignity [1st ed.] 9783030574758, 9783030574765

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Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations

Hasan Aydin Winston Langley  Editors

Human Rights in Turkey Assaults on Human Dignity

Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations Volume 15

Series Editors David M. Rasmussen, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, USA Alessandro Ferrara, Dipartimento di Storia, University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’, Rome, Italy Editorial Board Members Abdullah An-Na’im, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law, Emory University, Atlanta, USA Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Robert Audi, O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor for Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA Samuel Freeman, Avalon Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA Jürgen Habermas, Professor Emeritus, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt, Bayern, Germany Axel Honneth, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany and Columbia University, New York, USA, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Germany Erin Kelly, Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA Charles Larmore, W. Duncan MacMillan Family Professor in the Humanities, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA Frank Michelman, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Tong Shijun, Professor of Philosophy, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus, McGill University, Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada Michael Walzer, Professor Emeritus, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, Princeton, NJ, USA

The purpose of Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations is to publish high quality volumes that reflect original research pursued at the juncture of philosophy and politics. Over the past 20 years new important areas of inquiry at the crossroads of philosophy and politics have undergone impressive developments or have emerged anew. Among these, new approaches to human rights, transitional justice, religion and politics and especially the challenges of a post-secular society, global justice, public reason, global constitutionalism, multiple democracies, political liberalism and deliberative democracy can be included. Philosophy and Politics Critical Explorations addresses each and any of these interrelated yet distinct fields as valuable manuscripts and proposal become available, with the aim of both being the forum where single breakthrough studies in one specific subject can be published and at the same time the areas of overlap and the intersecting themes across the various areas can be composed in the coherent image of a highly dynamic disciplinary continent. Some of the studies published are bold theoretical explorations of one specific theme, and thus primarily addressed to specialists, whereas others are suitable for a broader readership and possibly for wide adoption in graduate courses. The series includes monographs focusing on a specific topic, as well as collections of articles covering a theme or collections of articles by one author. Contributions to this series come from scholars on every continent and from a variety of scholarly orientations.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13508

Hasan Aydin • Winston Langley Editors

Human Rights in Turkey Assaults on Human Dignity

Editors Hasan Aydin Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Culture Florida Gulf Coast University Fort Myers, FL, USA

Winston Langley University of Massachusetts Boston, MA, USA

ISSN 2352-8370 ISSN 2352-8389 (electronic) Philosophy and Politics - Critical Explorations ISBN 978-3-030-57475-8 ISBN 978-3-030-57476-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57476-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to all the oppressed people of Turkey and other nations who, because of their religion, nationality, color, political beliefs, social class, language, ethnicity, gender identities, or other characteristics, have been the target of persecutions or faced all sorts of discrimination, oppression, and brutality by those in power. We also dedicate it to all children who drowned in the Maritsa River and the Aegean Sea while fleeing from such an oppressive regime. I (Hasan Aydin) dedicate this work to my three sons (Mustafa Ihsan, Ikram Agah, and Tarik Burhan) and all the children of their generation who have suffered extensively/immensely being separated indefinitely from their parents and families due to human rights violations. May justice and peace become a global reality in the future unfolding of the twenty-first century, accompanied by new hope, love, and faith.

Foreword

When we consider Turkey today in terms of human rights and, in particular, minority rights, that touchstone subset of human rights, we see a state that is in one sense the antithesis of the Ottoman Empire and in another sense its continuation. Antithesis, because: In the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922), fundamentally a Medieval empire,1 there was naturally no such concept as human rights, seeing as how this term only entered into international documents following its first appearance in Article 1/3 of the 1945 UN Charter.2 The Republic of Turkey has been a part of the Council of Europe since the latter’s foundation in 1949 — an international organization built on the ideal and principle of human rights, even if this does not mean that these rights were always implemented by Turkey. Turkey furthermore accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of the Council of Europe’s judicial organ, the European Court of Human Rights, in January 1990 and is a signatory to a significant proportion of UN human rights agreements, even if by imposing interpretative declarations and reservations (Oran 2018, 69–83). As for minority rights (which are granted so that the equality recognized for minorities will not remain a dead letter), notwithstanding the rights to religious autonomy granted to non-Muslim subjects in the Ottoman Empire, prior to the term ekalliyet (minority)—first used in 1913 by the Committee of Union and Progress,

1 Historically, there have been two quite distinct types of empire: 1) the empires of Antiquity, between 3500 BCE and 476 CE (the Roman Empire in Europe, the Huns across Asia, and Han Dynasty in China, and so on), as well as the Medieval (800–1453) and Modern (1453–1789) empires (the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires, and so on); 2) the colonialist and imperialist empires from 1789 to the present (Great Britain, France, Germany, and so on). 2 Although the phrase previously appeared in France in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, this document was national, and not international.

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and first appearing in an official document in 1920 in Article 5 of the National Pact (Misak-ı Milli) (Bayir 2013, 68–69), there simply was no such concept or term.3 As for those rights and privileges accepted at the outset of the Ottoman Empire as a result of capitulations, these were given not to non-Muslim subjects, but to foreign Christian individuals and states. As for the 1923 Turkish nation-state4—which aimed to rebuild the country from scratch on the basis of the secular concept of nation (ulus) —in the third section (Articles 37–44) of its foundational document, the Lausanne Peace Treaty, Turkey accepted, nominally and officially, non-Muslim Turkish citizens as minorities. Article 44 further granted such citizens minority rights that, in the language of the treaty, “shall not be modified,” that “constitute obligations of international concern,” that fall under the protection of the League of Nations, and that “shall not be modified without the assent of the majority of the Council of the League of Nations.” At the same time, the autonomy non-Muslims enjoyed in the Ottoman system was lifted. The religious leaders of every minority community had to answer to the assistant governor of Istanbul and were kept under tight control. They were treated de facto as second-class citizens, and, perceived from the onset as extensions of European power, were subjected to forms of ethno-religious cleansing described below. Turkey has furthermore carried out, in a manner quite different than during the Ottoman Empire, very serious forms of oppression and discrimination against Kurds (who are Muslims, 75% of them Sunni) after the 1924 Constitution and, in particular, after the 1925 Sheik Said uprising. This is due to the fact that the nation-state in Turkey has yet to transform into a democratic state, and as such has been intolerant of all infra-identities.

Long before the emergence, in sixteenth-century Europe, of the first type of minority in the world, religious minorities, the Ottoman Empire, from 1453 onwards, employed the Millet System (millet meaning here congregation), rooted in the Constitution of Medina dated to the first half of the seventh century in the Muslim Middle East. In this inegalitarian system whose social basis was the religious community, non-Muslim communities were referred to as Millet-i Mahkume, or those about whom rulings were made, whereas Muslims were collectively called Millet-i Hakime, those who made the rulings. Though the former were not counted as minorities and were most certainly second-class subjects, both nominally or formally, relative to the latter, they did have certain religious rights, including the right to collect taxes from their own religious communities. And in an Empire that had no such concept as ethnic minority, they were in fact autonomous in terms of religious manners, customs, and culture. What’s more, the term Millet-i Hakime in practice meant Sunni Muslim. Alevis, who were heretics in the eyes of the Sunni state, as well as the “half community” (buçuk millet, from which the phrase “72.5 communities” comes) of Roma people were not counted by the Ottomans as part of the Millet-i Hakime. Without going into too much detail here, let us simply note that within the Millet-i Hakime, Alevis and Roma people constituted a sort of indeterminate grey zone. 4 One must not conflate national state with nation-state. The former dates to 1789 (to the onset of nationalism), the latter to the final quarter of the nineteenth century (that is, to the era of imperialism). The national state declares that the source of sovereignty lies not in God or the king, but in the national people (ulus). The nation-state, meanwhile, names a type of state that rejects all infraidentities beyond the supra-identity of the dominant ethno-religious group in a society. 3

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Continuation, because: Turkey, just like the Ottoman Empire, has rejected the very existence of ethnic minorities within the country. As in the Ottoman Empire, to be Muslim (indeed, Sunni Muslim) is fundamental in the Republic of Turkey. Despite all claims to secularism, in Turkey those who are not Muslim are simply not referred to as Turks. Rather, they are called “non-Muslim citizens,” or “citizen” for short, as in the motto “Citizen! Speak Turkish” used in campaigns in the 1930s and 1960s banning the use of minority languages. The foundation of the laic nation (ulus) was, in other words, built atop the Ottoman Millet System. In a manner similar to the idea of WASP as a category of de facto acceptable citizenship in the USA, in Republican Turkey there operates a de facto supra-identity that I have called LAHASUMUT: Laic Hanefi Sunni Muslim Turk. This book is made up of articles dealing exhaustively with the matter of human rights and minority rights in the Republic of Turkey and their violations, including those of sexual minorities. In this prologue, by way of an introduction to the subject, let us begin by making the following two opposing analytical distinctions: First, with 1923 began a great wave of modernization, and in the newly established state, human rights were in fact more advanced relative to the Ottoman Empire. The reasons for this had to do with the fact that a Revolution from Above5 brought an end to a situation in which the state was deemed to be the property of the Sultan. There was a jump from the religious concept of ummah or religious community to national community (which was declared, officially at least, to be secular), as well as from the concept of subject to that of citizen. Second, in attempting to establish a new national community through the use of a new state itself established in the wake of three consecutive wars (the Balkan [1912– 1913], First World [1914–1918], and Independence [1919–1922] wars), this Revolution from Above was naturally quite far from a democracy. And in this, non-Muslims and Kurds suffered the most, since at the very base of this new state were the monist and Turkish politicians of the Committee of Union and Progress of the Ottoman Empire. External dynamics also negatively affected these internal dynamics, as the zeitgeist towards the end of the Second World War in what was then the center of the world, Europe, was, with few exceptions, enveloped by the oppressing waves of a fascist or at least fascistic atmosphere, from Portugal in the west to Turkey in the east. This atmosphere was not to come to an end immediately after the Second World War. On the contrary, anti-communism was to take over, and this situation in the Republic of Turkey, which lasted until at least the end of the 1950s, was to grow

5 Because in pre-modern societies, the call for social progress does not come from the masses (that is, from below). In such conditions, Westernized elites “who emerge as representatives of the will of the people, and who wish when necessary to effect a leap forward in society despite the unenlightened convictions and positions of the masses” are able, by using the power of the state, to impose from above the advanced superstructure (namely, the law) of the West. This is termed a Revolution from Above.

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more prominent and repeat itself during military coups: on May 27, 1960, and particularly on March 12, 1971, and September 12, 1980. At the same time, in the early 2000s, Turkey was affected by the democratizing influences of external dynamics tied to Turkey’s EU candidacy. Between 2001 and 2004, the country went through a second Revolution from Above, in the form of EU Harmonization Packages aiming to address the lack of democracy of the first Revolution. These packages proved very important in addressing minority rights and human rights violations, particularly as they brought expanded freedom of expression. In this sense, important first steps were taken to move from a national security state to a human rights state, and important headway was made towards the protection of individuals from state oppression. Under the law, efforts began to distinguish thought from violence and criticism from insult. The military’s political power, too, was delimited, and it became more difficult to carry out torture. This second wave of modernization was at first supported by the then Prime Minister R. T. Erdoğan, though as he began gradually to set up an authoritarian regime, and in particular with the State of Emergency regime declared after the July 15, 2016, coup attempt in Turkey, this support was to disappear entirely. A new regime of oppression, the first signs of which came in 2005 with changes to the Criminal Code, was to steadily increase after 2013. And on July 15, 2016, following an unsuccessful coup attempt (the details of which remain unclear), the state of human rights gradually began to return to how things were before 1945, or even before 1923. As though he were waiting for precisely such an event to establish a One-Man Regime, Erdoğan set out not only to eradicate the followers of Fetullah Gülen but in fact to eradicate all opposition. This atmosphere further proved disastrous for Kurds, who in fact had nothing at all to do with the coup. Why things were so for the Kurds is a question of central importance. After all, Erdoğan, in a first for Turkey, oversaw a significant “Solution Process” related to the Kurdish issue, beginning in 2009 and put into practice particularly in 2012 and 2013. When it became clear that he was losing votes across Turkey, Erdoğan put an end to this process in March 2015 and appealed to the Army to deal with the Kurdish issue by armed force alone. The Army, for its part, had already held firm to a principle, since the early days of the Republic, of disciplining the Kurds through the use of force. This process coincided with a period in which competition between Erdoğan and the Gülen Movement had significantly escalated. Erdoğan, after all, had formed a remarkably close de facto coalition with the Gülen Movement early on due to the great need, in Erdoğan’s party, for trained and experienced personnel, and in so doing had paved the way for the Gülen Movement to amass a great deal of power. Further, the period in question was also one in which Erdoğan’s oppression, which gradually did away with democracy, met with the growing objections of the opposition. Henceforth, having lost the support of the Gülen Movement, President Erdoğan began to rely on a coalition made up of four elements in order to stay in power, in an atmosphere of increased fear and anxiety by his claims of the existence of terror and

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an existential threat to the country: 1) Islamist AKP, 2) Turkist MHP, 3) Tamed putschist elements (Ergenekon), and 4) ex-Maoist Kemalists and Neo-Nationalists (followers of the politician Doğu Perinçek). For this bizarre coalition (which I suggest we term the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse), the only common ground is animosity towards Kurds. And to be able to receive the continued support of this coalition, the One-Man Regime started military interventions against the Kurds of Turkey, but also the ones in Syrian and Iraqi territory. The State of Emergency regime is already sufficiently detailed in this book. Yet I would like here to mention a few additional points that I find important. This regime of oppression, extended seven times at 3-month intervals, was finally lifted on July 18 2018, yet on that date a law was issued that transferred, for a 3-year term, the powers under the State of Emergency to governors who are appointed by the President. Also, the detention period in such collective activities as protests was extended to 12 days. As noted below, Turkey has transitioned to a Presidential system that is lacking basic mechanisms of checks and balances. The Prime Ministry has been eliminated and the Parliament has clearly lost its importance as now everything is dealt with by Presidential decree. All peaceful demonstrations, including those of environmental advocates, are immediately dispersed by the police and gendarme with tear gas and clubs. Police who kill during demonstrations end up nowhere to be found or else are cleared of charges in one way or another. The Saturday Mothers, who for decades have gathered in a public square in Istanbul, on the model of the mothers in Argentina’s Plaza de Mayo, to keep alive the memory of their lost children without even a grave left behind to mark their absence, have been banned on the claim that they stand in the way of tourism. Pride Marches organized by LGBTI groups in cities and university campuses are also banned. And anyone who sets out on a hunger strike to protest such conditions is arrested. A growing number of women in prison who are pregnant, have recently given birth, or who already have children face desperate conditions, unable even to find sanitary pads. Refugees who have escaped ISIS gangs to the south and sought passage to Europe find themselves used as bargaining chips in negotiations with EU countries as hundreds more in their situation drown in the Aegean Sea. Those who remain in Turkey have begun to experience growing forms of anti-Arab racism in response to their presence. Incidents like those of the 1990s, when many in Turkey were taken into custody never to return, are beginning to resurface. Throughout, the government and the Judiciary remain silent. Claims of torture that have begun to come in, one after the other from the prisons, are simply not investigated. The number of civil servants and workers dismissed from duty by Emergency Degree (no questions asked) has surpassed 160,000. The number of academics dismissed from universities has surpassed 6,000. The severity of the situation can be understood from the fact that the number of academics dismissed from universities during the September 12, 1980, military coup totaled 77, all of whom were able to apply to the courts and return to work once the period of martial law was over,

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whereas now those dismissed by Emergency Decree cannot appeal to the courts. Currently, among those whose passports have not yet been seized, a serious brain drain to Europe is underway. A summary of what, in addition to the right to work, is forbidden for those dismissed by Emergency Decree may shock the unfamiliar. Among their basic rights seized by means of a secret memorandum sent to various organizations (in a process likened to a form of “civil death”) include: the right to hold a passport, to open bank accounts, to take a line of credit from the bank, to wire money from a bank, to obtain a business license, to sell one’s home, to receive retirement salaries and social benefits, as well as to receive money from the insurance company for their damaged cars (Biskin, 2020). It is impossible and unnecessary, in a short prologue, to summarize the book that follows. Yet I feel it is necessary to say a few words on the following two sine qua non matters of democracy: Freedom of the press—democracy’s first sine qua non—is now nonexistent. Nearly all newspapers and TV channels have been turned over, as a result of government pressure, to the holdings of businesspeople supporting those in power. 11,157 journalists are without work, and 91 are in prison. In 2019 alone, a total of 200 years of sentences were handed down to 59 journalists (11 bin 157 gazeteci işsiz 91 gazeteci cezaevinde, 2020). The impartiality and independence of the judiciary—democracy’s second sine qua non—is also nonexistent now. The reason lies in the fact that judges and prosecutors are overseen by the Board of Judges and Prosecutors, all of whose members are directly or indirectly selected by the ruling AKP. The Board immediately banishes to far-away locales any judges who exonerate newspaper writers or who release political prisoners and journalists—some, a number of times successively. In particular, what set in motion this process—a process that has nullified the mechanisms of the separation of powers and checks and balances that are the sine qua non of presidency regimes—was a judicial organ itself at the highest of levels: The Constitutional Court. According to the Constitution, the Constitutional Court cannot oversee State of Emergency decrees. Yet these decrees, according to the Constitution and to the internal bylaws of the Parliament, must be limited to events that necessitated the announcing of a State of Emergency and limited temporally to the duration of the State of Emergency. The Constitutional Court, by counting as State of Emergency decrees, from the beggining, decrees that in no way have such characteristics, and refusing to carry out due oversight, has paved the way for the AKP’s constitutional violations. For instance, among these decrees are those issued on such matters as opening, closing, or changing the name of a university, banning television programs about marriage, and making it a requirement for drivers to use winter tires. To summarize this final issue, it is instructive to relay ad verbum a January 19, 2020, statement from President and AKP Chairperson Erdoğan. Following the acquittal of once lieutenant general Metin İyidil, who had received a sentence of aggravated life imprisonment, he said:

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The judiciary has taken a truly very, very saddening step for our community. The interesting thing is this; of course, we gave the necessary instructions for all of these [italics mine], I mean, the fact that the person or people who gave this decision were FETO’cü shows just how far this has all reached...This is something incomprehensible. And, thankfully, our Ministry of Justice and our Office of the Attorney General has taken steps on this point. And these people were caught through operations carried out with the Interior Ministry (Erdoğan’dan Korgeneral İyidil’e beraat tepkisi 2020).

When talking about human rights, in every country minority rights ought to be considered first. The reason is that states, even when they do not oppress the dominant ethnic, religious, or sexual majority, may oppress their own minority citizens in some form and may violate their human rights and particularly their minority rights. Indeed, this is generally the case, and it is for these reasons that minority rights, as I stated at the outset, are the litmus test of human rights. In order to be able to properly evaluate the national context of this matter of minority rights, let us conclude our prologue by having a look at the ways in which the Turkish state has approached the concept of minority. In this, we see two quite distinct categories. The first such category is official minorities. “Official” here refers to those minorities protected by Section III of the 1923 Lausanne Peace Treaty, chiefly (and as a continuation of the Millet System) Armenians, Jews, and Greeks of Turkey. That said, what we might call the Big Three minorities (Greeks, Armenians, and Jews) have witnessed—as a result of a historical trauma known as Sèvres Paranoia, rooted in European intervention in the Ottoman Empire via non-Muslim minorities—how the rights granted to them by Lausanne have been implemented quite insufficiently (which is to say, have been violated). In addition to the Big Three, are a number of other minorities who are also non-Muslims (that is, who possess rights according to Lausanne) but are overlooked by the nation-state: Antiochean/Arab Greek Orthodox Christians, Syrians (whose private foundations were only recognized very recently), and, further, those who are again non-Muslims citizens, yet for whom no minority rights at all are recognized: Bahaists, Yezidis, Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Levantines. All of these non-Muslim groups have been subjected to ethno-religious cleansing. The reason is that in Turkey, the nation-state has carried out a policy of assimilation towards those infra-identities it was capable of assimilating (namely, to such Muslim yet non-Turkish groups as Bosnians and Circassians), whereas for those groups it believed to be incapable of assimilation (namely, non-Muslims), the policy has been ethno-religious cleansing. The decisive factor affecting the nation-state’s choice on this matter is the simple reality that especially in the Middle East and the Balkans, it is religion and sect, and not race and language, that represent the foundations of identity. In terms of ethno-religious cleansing, let us look at which types have been put into practice: (1) Territorial purge from one’s country and land (deportation, population exchange, exile)

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(2) Physical attacks (being beaten, being killed, having one’s possessions seized, the most well-known instance being the pogroms of September 6–7, 1955) (3) Religious discrimination in laws, treaties, and policy implementation (the most well-known instances being the 1942 Wealth Tax (Wikipedia 2017) and the 1936 Declaration6) The second such category is that of groups recognized as minorities by international standards, yet whom the Turkish nation-state refuses to recognize. International standards refer to certain fixed criteria in place since the Second World War: race, language, and religion. In the context of Turkey, because in the Lausanne Treaty only non-Muslims were accepted as minorities, Muslim non-Turkish groups (e.g., Laz, Georgians, Circassians, Albanians, Bosnians, Roma, Arabs, and, particularly, Kurds) are not accepted by the state as possessing minority rights.7 This situation is, because of Lausanne, legally neutral, yet many rights violations have come to the fore in terms not of minority rights but human rights. The reason for this is that although the title of Section III of Lausanne is “Protection of Minorities,”8 it contains provisions related not just to minority rights but to human rights as well. Article 39/4 clearly accepts language rights as a human right, among this category. Looking more closely at the article, it is quite clear that outside of official spaces, citizens can use any language whenever and wherever they wish: No restrictions shall be imposed on the free use by any Turkish national of any language in private intercourse, in commerce, religion, in the press, or in publications of any kind or at public meetings.

In particular, Article 39/5 introduced a vital language right: Notwithstanding the existence of the official language, adequate facilities shall be given to Turkish nationals of non-Turkish speech for the oral use of their own language before the Courts.

Thus, came about the possibility of defending oneself in the courts (official space) by speaking in one’s mother tongue. Yet Turkey has never implemented these articles of its foundational treaty, and the courts have convicted those who speak and write in Kurdish and who wish to testify at hearings orally in Kurdish. The Constitutional Court has further closed a

6

In 1936, the government, as a way of bringing an end to Islamist foundations, required all foundations to declare their real estate. In the 1970s, when the Cyprus imbroglio broke, this same policy was used to cripple minority foundations, ruling that the latter had no right to acquire properties beyond those listed in their 1936 Declarations. The state thus began to seize without compensation those properties acquired after 1936. 7 It must be noted that because the term minority equates, for many in Turkey, to non-Muslims deemed to be part of a second-class, Kurds and Alevis, much like the state, strongly reject the term. 8 The term human rights, as previously mentioned, only occurs in international documents in 1945, yet the term minority rights has been used in such documents since the sixteenth century.

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total of 13 political parties on the grounds of the principle of “undermining the unity of the state with its territory and nation” and the ban on “creating a minority.” In addition to these language rights of Kurds, the religious rights of Alevis have also been violated. The Cemevis where the latter group performs its religious ceremonies have not been accepted as places of worship, and their children have been forced to take part in courses at school on Sunni Islam. The decisions of the European Court of Human Rights regarding both of these matters, meanwhile, have not been put into effect. Finally, I wish to mention some of the consequences of these systematic violations of rights. (1) The basic approach of the Turkish nation-state can be paraphrased as: Minorities upset the cohesion of the state and the people. This approach, which impedes democracy, divides the populace, and weakens Turkey internationally, has three basic consequences: (a) Contemporary international law considers the protection of minorities through a four-sided approach: their existence will be protected, they will not be excluded, they will not be subjected to discrimination, and they will not be subject to assimilation (Bayir 2013, 8). Yet the Turkish nation-state has implemented precisely the opposite of all these four principles: it has denied the existence of minorities and subjected them to exclusion, discrimination, and assimilation. In particular, discrimination and assimilation, those two great forms of divisiveness, have gone hand in hand. (b) In terms of what is considered as an “acceptable citizen,” the nation-state has stratified and divided citizens of the Republic of Turkey into a de facto fourpart hierarchy to be ruled from high to low. At the top is the category of LAHASÜMÜT that I mentioned earlier. Since the Islamist AKP passed to the One-Man Regime, increasingly this term has shed its first syllable, becoming simply HASÜMÜT—that is, Hanefi, Sunni, Muslim, Turk. Below this group of citizens are the non-Turkish Muslims, groups subjected to assimilation. Meanwhile, Kurds, as Muslims who openly rejected assimilation, occupy one place below the aforementioned group in terms of acceptability. In last place are non-assimilable Muslims. As their assimilation was thought to be impossible, they occupy this lowest strata, and efforts have been made to have them leave the country entirely (as expressed by the widespread slogan “Love It or Leave It, Ya Sev Ya Terk Et”) or, as is now the case, to have them remain only in symbolic numbers and recognized, if at all, only as a folkloric curiosity of sorts. (c) While the monist mindset of the Revolution from Above of the 1920s and 1930s demonized, in the twentieth century, those who are different among the citizens of the Turkish Republic, the Islamist version of this same mindset has done the same in the twenty-first century, especially after

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2013, by establishing an informal four-part coalition. By building its power on this nationalist coalition I have previously characterized as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, it set in motion a true Counter-Revolution from Above on the basis of Islamist Turkism. (2) As a result of this tangle of contradictions, the transition of Turkey from a “National Security State” to a “Human Rights State” has been significantly delayed, burgeoning into a serious problem. The happiness of individuals and communities and, consequently, the viability of the state have in turn been compromised. The first wave of modernization brought about important advances, and its change indeed amounted to a very radical transformation. At the same time, though, in the first period of this Revolution from Above (the 1920s, the 30s, the 40s, then in a series of military coups), a significant proportion of citizens founded themselves in the position of “obligatory citizen,” their infra-identities having been denied (in particular, for the Kurds). This situation, as the result of the ongoing Counter-Revolution, is now on stage again: Those who are not Islamists find themselves in the position of “obligatory citizen.” A citizen whose identity has been rejected is an unhappy citizen and may represent a danger for the state. Since stationing a soldier with a bayonet beside each such citizen cannot be a solution, the only sensible path is to ensure that such citizens are not obligatory but voluntary citizens. To accomplish this end, it is imperative to address citizens not by the ethnic—indeed, ethno-religious—term Türk, but by the entirely territorial term Türkiyeli (of Turkey), and to wholly fulfill this obligation in law and in practice. Emeritus Professor, Ankara University Turkey, Ankara, Turkey

Baskın Oran

References 11 bin 157 gazeteci işsiz 91 gazeteci cezaevinde. 2020. Sözcü, January 10. https:// www.sozcu.com.tr/2020/gundem/11-bin-157-gazeteci-issiz-91-gazetecicezaevinde-5559717/ Bayir, Derya. 2013. Minorities and Nationalism in Turkish Law. United Kingdom: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Biskin, Haci. 2020. KHK’lilere bir de ‘gizemli genelge’ darbesi. Gazete Duvar, January 9. https://www.gazeteduvar.com.tr/gundem/2020/01/09/khklilere-birde-gizemli-genelge-darbesi/ Erdoğan’dan Korgeneral İyidil’e beraat tepkisi: Yargı için çok üzücü bir adım, anlamak mümkün değil, bunların hepsinin talimatını verdik!. 2020. T24, January

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19. https://t24.com.tr/haber/erdogan-berlin-ziyareti-oncesinde-aciklamalardabulunuyor,856639 Oran, Baskın. 2018. Etnik ve Dinsel Azınlıklar: Tarih, Teori, Hukuk, Türkiye, Literatür Yayınları, İstanbul [Updated English translation forthcoming: Minorities and Minority Rights in Turkey: From the Ottoman Empire to the Present State]. Wikipedia. 2017. “Varlık Vergisi.” Last modified September 1, 2019. https://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Varl%C4%B1k_Vergisi

Acknowledgments

As in any project of this magnitude, the completion of this collection involved the constructive intervention of more than just the editors and contributors. The idea of the book stemmed from our concern for a more inclusive and humanely grounded global understanding of the human rights violations in Turkey, and the relationship among those violations and the modern history and development of the country and its people. We would like to thank those who have contributed to the fulfillment of this volume. First and foremost, we owe profound thanks to our colleague, the Dean of the College of Education, Florida Gulf Coast University, Dr. Eunsook Hyun, “Eunny,” who selflessly advised us and provided us with suggestions to prepare this book. We would also like to thank all the contributors included in this volume for their enormous patience, hard work, and enthusiasm through the lengthy process, as well as for their willingness to persevere with this project. The chapter authors have been magnificent, scholarly, and patient. Without their keen interest and commitment and compliance with instructions, compiling this collection would have been impossible. We are inspired by each contributor’s dedication, insights, and passion. Our involvement with them has been pleasurable and rewarding, and we consider them close colleagues and friends. We firmly believe that no author or editor could accomplish such as an enormous task as writing or editing a book without the help of innumerable people whose names are rarely mentioned or recognized. We wish to offer an immense thanks to the many anonymous reviewers who, over the months, challenged and enriched the collection. They provided valuable critiques, positive feedback, coherence, content presentation, and critical insights to heighten the quality of each chapter. The entire process was an engaging and welcoming learning experience for us. As a result of these reviewers, the book is much more cohesive and fluent. We hope it will inspire others to research and critically examine the myriad of disjunctures and conjectures within the essential areas of human rights issues in Turkey.

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Acknowledgments

We also thank our editorial assistant, Koksal Avincan, a scholar in exile and a scholar at risk, who has settled in a refugee camp in Germany. We have long admired him from afar for his work as an academic as well as his example as a fighter for human rights. He not only assisted us, but he undertook the laborious and often difficult task of tracking down sources, formatting footnotes, and preparing the tables. We are grateful beyond measure for his unwavering support of this project and for his friendship. His work has been exemplary and deserving of considerable credit. I also want to thank Tim Walters and Kristina Andrews for understanding the importance of such a project and for their excitement regarding the collection. We were very fortunate to have friends who are so passionate about editing and proofreading such relevant research on human rights violations in Turkey. This volume could never have been published in such a timely manner had it not been for Tim and Tina’s strong support in this work. We would also like to thank all the staff at Springer Publishing for their guidance and good humor, their understanding of the importance of such a collection, and their excitement regarding each manuscript. Special thanks go to Miranda Dijksman, Floor Oosting, and Alexander James for their admirable support in commissioning this book and for their exceptional dedication and hard work that brought forth this project to fruition. This collection could never have been published in such a timely manner had it not been for Miranda, Floor, and Alex’s strong belief in the work. Finally, we would like to thank numerous people in exile, whom, unfortunately, we cannot name, who believed in us and supported us in finishing this work to further spread the values, principles, and purposes of human rights across the world, the achievement of which we need more than ever before.

Contents

Part I

An Overview of Human Rights in Turkey

1

Introducing Human Rights in Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hasan Aydin and Winston Langley

3

2

Human Rights in Turkey: Past, Present and Future . . . . . . . . . . . . Ercan Balcioglu

23

Part II

Freedom and Non-discrimination

3

Freedom of the Media in Turkey Under the AKP Government . . . . Vedat Demir

51

4

Discrimination Based on Religion: A Complex Story in Turkey . . . İştar Gözaydın

89

5

Non-Discrimination, Minority Rights and Self-Determination: Turkey’s Post-Coup State of Emergency and the Position of Turkey’s Kurds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Emre Turkut and Thomas Phillips

6

Justice and Development (AKP) Attitudes Towards the LGBTI Community in Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Fait Muedini

7

LGBTQ Rights in Turkey: Do Not Touch My Body! . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Barbaros Sansal

Part III 8

The Rights of the Displaced

Syrian Refugees in Turkey: (Un)Equal Opportunities in Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Alia Hadid and Rabia Hos

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Contents

Part IV

State of Emergency (OHAL)

9

Authoritarianization and Human Rights in Turkey: How the AKP Legitimizes Human Rights Violations . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Mehmet Efe Caman

10

Shunned and Purged: Turkey’s Crackdown on the Hizmet (Gülen) Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Sophia Pandya, Brenda Oliden, and Ibrahim Aytac Anli

11

The Cases of Dismissal Under State of Emergency (OHAL): The Right to a Fair Trial as a Human Right . . . . . . . . . . 227 Ufuk Yesil

12

Intellectuals on Hunger Strike for Reinstatement to Their Job: The Case of the “Yuksel Resistance” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Acun Karadag and Nazan Bozkurt

13

Human Rights Violations and Medicolegal Approach . . . . . . . . . . . 293 Alper Keten

Part V

Social and Economic Rights

14

Right to Education: Challenges and Issues Under the Justice and Development Party Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 Uzeyir Ogurlu and Koksal Avincan

15

Academic Freedom and Living in Exile: Experiences of Academics in Turkey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 339 Hasan Aydin, Viktor Mak, and Kristina Andrews

16

The Effects of Democratic Regression on Turkish Economy and the Brain Drain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365 Zeliha Ozdogan

17

Neoliberal De-Development in Turkey and the AKP’s Socioeconomic War on the Counterhegemony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 383 Victoria Araj and Arin Y. Savran

Part VI

Women and Children Rights

18

Imprisoned Women and Children in Turkey: Human Rights Violations Under the State of Emergency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411 Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu

19

Trauma of Turkish Women and Children in an Era of Political Unrest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435 Vonya Womack

Contents

Part VII 20

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Foreign Policy Initiative: A Case Review

Turkey’s Accession to the European Union in Context of Its Human Rights Violations: Observations of a Journalist from Brussels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451 Gülsüm Alan

Contributors

Gülsüm Alan Euronews, Brussels, Belgium Kristina Andrews Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, FL, USA Ibrahim Aytac Anli Independent Researcher, Washington, DC, USA Victoria Araj Women in International Affairs Network, London, UK Koksal Avincan A Doctoral Student and Human Rights Activist at Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA Hasan Aydin Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Culture, Florida Gulf Coast University, Fort Myers, FL, USA Ercan Balcioglu Faculty of Police and Security Management, Berlin School of Economics and Law, Berlin, Germany Nazan Bozkurt Human Rights Activist, Düzce, Turkey Mehmet Efe Caman Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Canada Vedat Demir University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu Parliament Member for Peoples’ of Democratic Party (HDP), Grand National Assembly of Turkey, Çankaya, Turkey İştar Gözaydın Independent Researcher and Human Rights Activist, Istanbul, Turkey Alia Hadid School of Education, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA Rabia Hos School of Education, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA Acun Karadag Human Rights Activist, Ankara, Turkey Alper Keten Institute of Forensic and Traffic Medicine, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany xxv

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Contributors

Winston Langley University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, USA Viktor Mak Human Rights Activist and Independent Researcher, Budapest, Hungary Fait Muedini Department of International Studies, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN, USA Uzeyir Ogurlu University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Stevens Point, WI, USA Brenda Oliden California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA Baskin Oran Emeritus Professor at Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey Zeliha Ozdogan Penn State Harrisburg, Middletown, PA, USA Sophia Pandya California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA Thomas Phillips Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK Barbaros Sansal Human Rights Activist, Ankara, Turkey Arin Y. Savran University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden Emre Turkut Ghent Rolin-Jaequemyns International Law Institute (GRILI), Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium Vonya Womack Cabrini University, Radnor, PA, USA Ufuk Yesil Independent Researcher and Human Rights Activist, Istanbul, Turkey

About the Editors

Hasan Aydin earned his Ph.D. from the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2011. He has served many administrative positions, including Associate Chair of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Graduate Program Coordinator, Erasmus Exchange Student Coordinator, and Graduate Assistantship Coordinator at the College of Education at Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey. He also has served as the chair of many masters and doctoral dissertation committees. Currently, Dr. Aydin is a human rights activist and a Professor of Multicultural Education in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Culture at Florida Gulf Coast University. He also serves as a Director of Education and Youth Empowe