ISTANBUL (AP) – The president of Turkey has ordered the establishment of two new departments in the country’s most prestigious university, which is shocked by weeks of protests, who have claimed that he has nominated a new rector with government ties.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision, published in the Official Gazette on Saturday, says faculties of law and communication at Bogazici University will be launched. Critics say the creation of new departments will enable the presidential rector to staff them with government loyalists.
For more than a month, students and faculties have mostly led peaceful protests against the new rector, Melih Bulu, who has ties to Erdogan’s ruling party. They are asking for Bulu’s resignation and that the university may elect its own president.
In an open letter to Erdogan, protesting Bogazici students called the decision to intimidate new departments and called it ‘little tricks’.
“Your efforts to tackle our university with your own political militants are the symptom of the political crisis in which you have fallen,” the letter reads.
Police detained hundreds of protesters at the university and in solidariteitsbetogings elsewhere, some taken after raids on their homes. Most were later released.
Top government officials said terrorist groups were provoking the protests, and Erdogan called the protesting students terrorists. The press statements of the governor’s office in Istanbul list detention numbers with alleged links to banned left and Kurdish militant groups.
Erdogan also singled out Ayse Bugra, an emeritus professor at the university. Bugra is married to Turkish philanthropist and leader of civil society Osman Kavala, who has been in prison for more than three years on charges of espionage and attempting to overthrow the government.
Erdogan accuses Kavala of being the ‘Turkish leg’ of US billionaire George Soros. Erdogan said on Friday, when a court in Istanbul ruled to keep Kavala in jail, “his wife is a woman who is among the provocateurs of Bogazici University.”
Her students issued a separate statement on Saturday, saying the attacks on her should stop.
“We are very saddened by the personal and malicious attacks on her following the appointment of the rector of Bogazici University,” her students said over four decades, adding: “Ayşe Bugra is a source of inspiration for the thousands of students she has. learned and mentored. … She is a treasure for both Bogazici University and Turkey. ‘
Bugra said she thought the president’s statement was deplorable and that she was saddened by her country.
Officials from the United States, the United Nations and the European Union have criticized Turkey’s handling of the protests, as well as a series of homophobic comments made by Erdogan and other officials while denouncing the protests.
With the same mandate, the president opened new faculties in several universities, closed others and appointed 11 rectors elsewhere.
The students said in their letter to Erdogan that they knew its publication was likely to cause criminal charges, including for insulting the president, but they promised to continue talking and protesting.