President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
has strongly reacted to a petition signed by more than 1,000 local and
international academics calling on the Turkish government to end the
security operations being committed in southeastern Anatolia and to
return to table for talks to resolve the Kurdish issue, describing the
signatories as “ignorant.” After an urgent meeting on Jan. 12, the
Supreme Education Board (YÖK) announced that legal action would be taken
over local academics who have signed the petition.
Some 1,128 academics from 89 different universities - including foreign scholars like Noam Chomsky, David Harway and Immanuel Wallerstein - signed the petition titled “We won’t be a part of this crime,” which called on Ankara to end the “massacre and slaughter.”
Erdoğan, in an address to Turkish ambassadors gathered for an annual conference, lashed out at the signatories and said human rights violations in the southeast were being committed by terrorists, not by the state.
“Despite all of these facts, this crowd, which calls itself academics, accuses the state through a statement. Not only this, they also invite foreigners to monitor developments. This is the mentality of colonialism,” he said. Likening today’s situation with the Turkish War of Independence, Erdoğan said the country was again facing “treason” from “so-called intellectuals.”
“Hey, you so-called intellectuals! You are not enlightened persons, you are dark. You are nothing like intellectuals. You are ignorant and dark, not even knowing about the east or the southeast. We know these places just like we know our home addresses,” he said, reiterating his position that Turkey’s problem is “not a Kurdish one, but one of terror.”
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