University challenged Turkey’s president scapegoats gay-friendly students – The Economist
SQUADRONS OF armed policemen block the entrance. Metal barriers line the avenue leading up to the campus. Snipers occasionally emerge on nearby rooftops. Bogazici University has long been considered one of Turkey’s most prestigious. Today it resembles a besieged terrorist hideout.
That, believe it or not, is how Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, sees it. On February 1st police stormed the campus and detained dozens of students who were protesting about his appointment of a government loyalist as their rector. The protests have taken place regularly for over a month. They escalated after the arrest of four students who had organised an art show that included a rainbow flag alongside an image of the Kaaba, the black cube at the heart of Mecca. Turkey’s interior minister called the students “LGBT perverts”. Mr Erdogan compared the protesters (at least 600 of whom have been detained) to terrorists. “There is no such thing as LGBT,” he said on February 3rd. (Why he is so upset about something he doesn’t think exists remains a mystery.)
Mr Erdogan tends to inflame protests. He often depicts them as part of an existential struggle between pious and secular, conservative and degenerate, patriotic and foreign—and crushes them. This tactic worked in 2013, when a small protest in defence of a small park snowballed into countrywide demonstrations after Mr Erdogan referred to the protesters as looters and had them sprayed with tear-gas and rubber bullets. Dozens were later rounded up and indicted on coup charges.
Mr Erdogan is doing something similar today, while attempting to seize control of Bogazici, a rare bastion of liberalism in a country increasingly under the sway of nationalists and Islamists. Sexual minorities make a perfect target. Homophobia in Turkey is a chronic condition. With the exception of the country’s main Kurdish party, no political group in Turkey has embraced LGBT rights, out of both conviction and fear of a conservative backlash.
After an abortive coup in 2016, Mr Erdogan redoubled his attempts to bring education into line with his vision of a more pious, prouder Turkey, a country looking inward rather than westward. Under an emergency law, he sacked over a thousand academics accused of terrorist sympathies (with scant evidence) and gave himself the power to appoint university rectors. His choice of Melih Bulu, a longtime member of the ruling party, as Bogazici’s president, has gone down particularly badly. Since being parachuted in, Mr Bulu has had to contend with claims that he plagiarised parts of his dissertation. Condoning the arrests of hundreds of his students has not made him popular on campus.
Once again, Turkey’s president has deliberately turned a local crisis into a national one. Once again, he seems poised to prevail through a combination of division, intimidation and force. But all this comes at a price. In a poll published last year, over 62% of young people in Turkey said they would prefer to live abroad if they had the means. If the country’s best and brightest start leaving, Mr Erdogan will have no one to blame but himself. ■
This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Lesbian, gay, bi and terrorist?”