commune-or-nothing:

“These are terrorist youths!” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said this about left-wing students at the prestigious Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. He was speaking at a congress of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) on Saturday.

Last Monday, around 20 Islamist students gathered at Boğaziçi University to celebrate the victory of the Turkish army in the Syrian province of Afrin. They were handing out sweets (Lokum, also known as “Turkish delight”) to passers-by.

Anti-war and left-wing students organized a peaceful counter protest. Around 25 students held up a banner that read: “There is nothing to celebrate about war and occupation!”

Immediately, a witch-hunt against the activists began in social media, soon taken up by the mass media. The university rector defended the “free speech” of the Islamist students, while calling the anti-war activists “terrorists” – without any further explanation. This is typical in Erdogan’s Turkey: Any opposition to the government is characterized as “terrorist”. The AKP is trying to change the university law to make it easier to expel students from the university and silence criticism.

On Thursday morning, six students were arrested by the police in their homes. By noon that day, students had gathered at Boğaziçi University to protest against the repression. Here, seven more people were detained by the police. Of the 13 arrested on Thursday, 7 were released the same day and 3 more on Friday. But a further activist was detained on Friday. So at the moment, four students remain in prison.

Most of the activists are from the Marksist Fikir Toplulukları (Community for Marxist Ideas, MFT) and the Sosyalist Emekçiler Partisi (Socialist Labourer’s Party, SEP), Trotskyist organizations with a long tradition at the Istanbul university.

Erdogan Has Left-Wing University Students from Istanbul Arrested