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While the AKP has certainly become more outspoken about its intent to assert influence over Turkey’s academic institutions, it has been doing so behind the scenes for several years now.<\/span><\/p>\n Julia HARTE<\/span><\/p>\n \u0130stanbul – B\u0130A News Center<\/span><\/p>\n 03 April 2012, Tuesday <\/span><\/p>\n Two years ago, a scientist named Onur Hamzao\u011flu<\/strong> began finding arsenic, mercury and lead in the women and children who live in Turkey’s Kocaeli Province, the country’s second biggest industrial zone.<\/span><\/p>\n Hamzao\u011flu, the head of the public health department at the local university, encountered these heavy metals in infants’ feces and mothers’ breast milk in the course of a three-year research project that began in 2009 and will end later this year.<\/span><\/p>\n When he told a journalist about his findings in early 2011, however, Hamzao\u011flu triggered a government campaign aimed at discrediting him and his research.<\/span><\/p>\n The mayor of Kocaeli, a member of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) dismissed Hamzao\u011flu as a “charlatan” in the media, and sued for Hamzao\u011flu’s imprisonment on the grounds that he was “inciting fear and panic in the public”. Turkey’s Ministry of Health sent a similar complaint to the AKP-controlled Council of Higher Education, provoking Kocaeli University’s president to launch disciplinary and ethical investigations against him.<\/span><\/p>\n On March 15, Kocaeli’s Basic Criminal Court awarded Hamzao\u011flu and his supporters a small victory. For insulting Hamzao\u011flu in the media, the Kocaeli mayor will have to pay a fine of approximately $2,000.<\/span><\/p>\n If the mayor wins his suit, however, Hamzao\u011flu could still face up to four years in jail for going public with his research. Hamzao\u011flu’s employer, Kocaeli University, will have to give permission before he can face the criminal trial that could result in his imprisonment.<\/span><\/p>\n In most countries with advanced systems of higher education, he wouldn’t need to worry about his university selling him out that way. But in Turkey, Hamzao\u011flu says, “Politicians in local governments and the Council of Higher Education put pressure on universities,” preventing scientists from exercising full academic freedom.<\/span><\/p>\n Hamzao\u011flu’s case is just one instance of political interests trumping scientific integrity. But a larger shadow of government intervention is creeping over Turkey’s entire scientific community.<\/span><\/p>\n *<\/span><\/p>\n Surrounded by the smell of fresh paint and the echo of still-empty office space, Mehmet Ali Alpar<\/strong> explains why he and 66 others resigned from Turkey’s twenty-year-old national science academy (T\u00dcBA) in November, and helped found an alternate academy, the BA, whose headquarters we are now sitting in.<\/span><\/p>\n “The government’s perception was that T\u00dcBA was prejudiced,” says Alpar, who was part of T\u00dcBA’s first assembly in 1993 and now chairs BA.<\/span><\/p>\n The AKP, which is the most religious of Turkey’s major political parties, was uneasy with T\u00dcBA’s wholehearted endorsement of Darwinian evolution, Alpar suspects.<\/span><\/p>\n “All members of T\u00dcBA, like scientists anywhere, are not creationists,” explains Alpar. “I suspect this is a reason for the government seeing us as biased. The dangerous step is when the politicians say, ‘Well, since we won a majority in the elections, we can decide on all issues, including scientific issues.'”<\/span><\/p>\n That’s what happened to T\u00dcBA last autumn. Using a controversial procedure for making “law by decree”, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan<\/strong>‘s cabinet issued two decrees fundamentally altering the structure of T\u00dcBA.<\/span><\/p>\n Rather than appoint its own members internally – established practice in every other international science academy – two-thirds of T\u00dcBA’s membership would henceforth be candidates selected by two government bodies: the Council of Higher Education (Y\u00d6K) and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (T\u00dcB\u0130TAK).<\/span><\/p>\n Nearly half of T\u00dcBA’s 138 members resigned in protest.<\/span><\/p>\n “Before the decrees were announced, T\u00dcBA was never consulted, and nobody ever asked for any information from T\u00dcBA,” says Y\u00fccel Kanpolat<\/strong>, the president of T\u00dcBA and a former professor of neurosurgery at Ankara University.<\/span><\/p>\n “Myself and the remaining members are all waiting, hoping that the government will finally understand its mistake and take a step toward reversing the new procedure.”<\/span><\/p>\n But many former T\u00dcBA members don’t share Kanpolat’s optimism. At the end of February, Alpar says, he learned that universities had already been asked to nominate T\u00dcBA member candidates for Y\u00d6K’s consideration. Neither Y\u00d6K, T\u00dcB\u0130TAK nor the Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology returned calls for comment on this article.<\/span><\/p>\n Shortly after stepping down from T\u00dcBA, Alpar and sixteen of the academy’s other former members founded the BA. Now 52 members strong, the new academy received a one-year donation of free office space from Turkish businessman Izzettin Silier, and has already started a conference series and begun planning educational initiatives.<\/span><\/p>\n *<\/span><\/p>\n “We want to raise religious youth. Do you expect the conservative democrat AK Party to raise an atheist generation? That might be your business, your mission, but not ours,” said Prime Minister Erdo\u011fan in a parliamentary address<\/span> at the beginning of February.<\/span><\/p>\n While the AKP has certainly become more outspoken about its intent to assert influence over Turkey’s academic institutions, it has been doing so behind the scenes for several years now.<\/span><\/p>\n Y\u00d6K itself was a fiercely secular institution until 2007, when Turkish President Abdullah G\u00fcl appointed a new president from the AKP’s ranks to bring Y\u00d6K’s aims and activities in line with AKP ideology. In the same year, G\u00fcl appointed a new president to T\u00dcB\u0130TAK, and the next year, the government amended the charter of formerly autonomous T\u00dcB\u0130TAK so that Erdo\u011fan would select half of its 14-member board.<\/span><\/p>\n In 2009, as T\u00dcB\u0130TAK’s magazine was preparing to release an issue centered around the 200-year anniversary of Darwin’s birth, the cover story on Darwin was pulled at the last minute and the magazine’s chief editor fired.<\/span><\/p>\n “The way that T\u00dcB\u0130TAK has been increasingly brought under the control of the AKP is emblematic of the way that the AKP and the bureaucracy have become increasingly interwoven,” says Howard Eissenstat, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at St. Lawrence University and Amnesty International’s Turkey specialist.<\/span><\/p>\n The degree to which the AKP has now become synonymous with the Turkish state hasn’t been seen since the Turkish Democrat Party enjoyed single-party power in the 1950s, according to Eissenstat. In the half century following the Democrat Party’s fall from power, a handful of parties wrangled for their place in Turkey’s government, each with a separate constituency to protect.<\/span><\/p>\n “In a typical university, you used to have departments that were typically affiliated with one party or another,” says Eissenstat.<\/span><\/p>\n But now, he explains, “we’re seeing more and more administrators who are sympathetic to the AKP, who see themselves as representatives of it, and they are making it difficult to do work and be promoted if you’re not following the party line.”<\/span><\/p>\n Alpar agrees that the AKP’s effort to exert its influence over Turkey’s educational institutions highlights a deeper, more sinister trend.<\/span><\/p>\n “This is part of a recent political climate in this country. It boils down to a mistaken interpretation of what democracy is. Democracy doesn’t say that a majority vote gives the government infinite wisdom and the mandate to decide on all technical matters.”<\/span><\/p>\n *<\/span><\/p>\n Since news first broke of the lawsuit and investigations against Hamzao\u011flu, his situation has attracted considerable attention in Turkey and beyond. The International Association of Health Policy called<\/span> for scientists around the world to sign a petition of support. Hamzao\u011flu’s case was reported in The Times of London and mentioned in a recent post<\/span> on The New York Times’s website.<\/span><\/p>\n T\u00dcBA has also received letters from science academies all over the world, expressing dismay at the change in its membership process.<\/span><\/p>\n “A loss of autonomy would diminish [T\u00dcBA’s] effectiveness, both within Turkey and the international scientific community,” wrote Ralph Cicerone, president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, in an open letter to President G\u00fcl.<\/span><\/p>\n Over the long term, sacrificing scientific integrity and academic freedom to the ruling party’s increasing need for control will ultimately make Turkey less competitive, says Eissenstat.<\/span><\/p>\n “There are real costs to this sort of repression. There’s almost certainly going to be a greater brain drain in Turkey. There’s almost certainly going to be a drop in its scientific productivity.” (JH\/HK)<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While the AKP has certainly become more outspoken about its intent to assert influence over Turkey’s academic institutions, it has been doing so behind the scenes for several years now. Julia HARTE \u0130stanbul – B\u0130A News Center 03 April 2012, Tuesday Two years ago, a scientist named Onur Hamzao\u011flu began finding arsenic, mercury and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":52578,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[3758],"class_list":["post-52577","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-freedom-of-speech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52577","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=52577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/smoke.jpg\" "\\"smoke\\"")
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