Students protest PM Erdoğan’s meeting with Turkish rectors

ISTANBUL – Daily News with wires

A group of around 50 people calling themselves the Turkey Youth Union gathered Sunday in Istanbul’s Beşiktaş district near the Prime Ministry office at Dolmabahçe Palace to protest Erdoğan and Yusuf Ziya Özcan, the head of the country’s Higher Education Board.

Student groups protested a meeting Sunday between university rectors and the prime minister, who called for freedom in the country’s schools and said he had not ordered charges to be filed against protesters at previous appearances.

Eighteen university students were recently sentenced to 15 months in prison for protesting Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at Istanbul Technical University, in one of the more severe crackdowns on students protesting government officials.

“I had no criminal complaint against [the students]. Unfortunately, it is all an initiative of the judiciary. I did not even have any information about the incidents. I learned about them afterwards from media reports,” Erdoğan said.

A group of around 50 people calling themselves the Turkey Youth Union gathered Sunday in Istanbul’s Beşiktaş district near the Prime Ministry office at Dolmabahçe Palace to protest Erdoğan and Yusuf Ziya Özcan, the head of the country’s Higher Education Board, or YÖK, the private news site CNNTürk reported.

Students hung a banner on a nearby overpass that read, “Hey Tayyip, we too call the destroyer of the Republic, the destroyer of the Republic.”

Police removed the banner and blocked the protesters from reaching the Prime Ministry office. The group dispersed without further incident.

Speaking to the university rectors in his office at the palace, Erdoğan said universities should focus on the country’s chronic problems and not fall into the trap of defending the status quo.

“Turkey has many really important and urgent problems, from economics to democratization, education to culture. It is impossible for the government to solve all these issues on its own,” Erdoğan said, calling on universities to produce solutions.

In his remarks, the prime minister also touched upon the issue of freedom in universities, noting that during different periods, Russian literature departments were closed due to the communism threat and Arabic literature departments were shuttered because of the threat of fundamentalist Islam.

“Universities that should provide a ground and insurance for freedoms were remembered for years for bans, limitations, oppressions and, I say with sorrow, for inhuman practices like ‘convincing rooms,’” Erdoğan said, referring to the places in Istanbul University where female students wearing headscarves were in the past urged to remove their veils.

“For dozens of years, beards, moustaches and clothes were unfortunately discussed instead of the problems of science, scientists and the quality of universities,” the prime minister said.

He added that protesting something should not include destructive or violent acts.

Turkey has seen a number of student protests recently. One group of students from Yıldız Technical University was temporarily banned from entering the campus after tension erupted at the school over a banner expressing opposition to allowing the headscarf at universities. Previously, two students were arrested – and remain in jail after eight months – for bringing a banner in support of free education to a meeting Erdoğan held with Roma people. The latest action by students was held in Eskişehir, where protesters threw eggs at Haşim Kılıç, the head of the Constitutional Court.

Erdoğan will meet Saturday with a second group of rectors.