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A TURKISH decree banning Turkish Cypriot students who study at schools in the government controlled areas from applying to universities there was yesterday slammed by local educationalists.<\/p>\nA TURKISH decree banning Turkish Cypriot students who study at schools in the government controlled areas from applying to universities there was yesterday slammed by local educationalists.<\/p>\n
\u201cStudents who study in the south will definitely not benefit from this new ruling,\u201d the north\u2019s \u2018education minister\u2019 Kemal Durust said, adding: \u201cIt was already one of our aims to discourage students from going to schools in the south\u201d.<\/p>\n
However, head of the Turkish Cypriot teachers union (KTOS) Sener Elcil slammed the ruling as \u201cracist and discriminatory\u201d.<\/p>\n
The decree by the Turkish Higher Education Authority (YOK) in Ankara was issued on May 25, but was only announced by the north\u2019s \u2018education ministry\u2019 earlier this week. According to the ruling, if the student is a \u2018citizen\u2019 of the \u2018TRNC\u2019 but has passed his or her exams in the government-controlled areas of Cyprus, their application will not be accepted.<\/p>\n
On a more positive note, students who have passed British GCEs and A levels will, for the first time, be formally accepted by 79 state-run universities across Turkey. Previously, students were required to have taken the centralised Turkish university entrance exams.<\/p>\n
\u201cBy making it a condition that students study in the north, they are discriminating against students who choose to study in the south,\u201d Elcil said, adding that the ruling was part of Turkey\u2019s \u201ccolonialist\u201d approach to the north.<\/p>\n
\u201cTurkey is setting up its schools here and taking over ours; the intention is clear\u201d.<\/p>\n
Former head of educational planning in the north Hasan Alicik also attacked the ruling by saying, \u201cAre children who study in the south not our citizens? How can we discriminate against our own people in such a way?\u201d<\/p>\n
Alicik added that many valuable members of the Turkish Cypriot community were graduates of the English School in Nicosia and other educational establishments in the south. He asked under what rationale Turkish universities could accept a Greek Cypriot with A levels from a school south of the Green Line, but not a Turkish Cypriot one.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis ruling is purely political,\u201d he concluded.<\/p>\n
Parent of a former Turkish Cypriot student at the English School in south Nicosia Hilmi Cavli told the Cyprus Mail he found the ruling \u201cinhumane\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they are going to strip people of their rights in this way, they should relieve them of their responsibilities such as national service,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is unfair and a double standard\u201d.<\/p>\n
Cavli added that the reason he sent his son, who now studies at Oxford University, to the English School was that he was a former student of the school and because he believed it offered a high quality of education.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was expensive and problematic to send our son to school in the south, but there simply isn\u2019t a school of that caliber in the north,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cIf they want to stop children going to schools in the south they would do better to open high quality schools in the north, rather than trying to do it with discriminatory laws\u201d.<\/p>\n
via Uproar as Turkey bans students from Cyprus – Cyprus Mail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A TURKISH decree banning Turkish Cypriot students who study at schools in the government controlled areas from applying to universities there was yesterday slammed by local educationalists. \u201cStudents who study in the south will definitely not benefit from this new ruling,\u201d the north\u2019s \u2018education minister\u2019 Kemal Durust said, adding: \u201cIt was already one of our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":28988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[211],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cyprus-trnc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}