Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has urged an Istanbul university to expel students arrested after an anti-war demonstration.

Referring to 15 students arrested at a peaceful protest at Boğaziçi University last month, President Erdogan said that the students were “communists, traitors and terrorists” and should not be allowed to attend university, the Turkish Minute news website reported.

“Those are terrorist youths. We will conduct investigations into them. After identifying them, we will not let them get an education at the universities because a university is not a place for educating terrorist youths,” said President Erdoğan during a speech at the congress held by his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

However, more than 1,200 academics have signed a petition calling for the release of the students, stating that their arrests “continue a disturbing trend of criminalising political speech and dissent in Turkey”.

The letter, penned by the Academic Solidarity Network, asks the Turkish government for the immediate release of the 15 students in the days after a peaceful protest in Istanbul on 19 March against the ongoing Turkish military offensive in the Afrin region of Syria.

The letter, whose signatories include Nobel laureates Eric Wieschaus and Jack W. Szostak, adds that the arrests on campus and police raids of student homes and dormitories follows the trend seen after the crackdown on free speech since the failed anti-government coup of 2016.

The letter has been sent to Mr Erdoğan, who used his speech at the AKP congress to praise students who had set up a stand on campus to honour slain soldiers in the Afrin conflict, calling them “believers, local and national”.

The academics’ letter says that the signatories “strongly oppose the recent arrests and harassment of students at Boğaziçi University in İstanbul, Turkey”.

“President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has cynically referred to these students as ‘terrorists’, vowed to expel them from Boğaziçi University, and to deny them the right to study at any other university,” it continues, adding that “we have heard this kind of verbal attack from Erdoğan before and it was followed by the detention of thousands of academics, journalists, artists, and human rights advocates”.

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com </s> Baku. 4 January. REPORT.AZ/ Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that purpose of the terrorist attacks in Istanbul was separation of Turkish citizens.

Report informs citing Anadolu, he said that Turkey will never give in to terrorism and will continue to fight.

The President also said that those who accuse Turkey of interfering in internal affairs of other countries, not know beans. </s> An Istanbul court on Saturday ordered the formal arrest of nine employees of the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper, widening Turkey’s crackdown on dissenting voices. The arrests came hours after a bomb in the country’s southeast killed two children.

The formal arrests, which come a day after nine co-leaders of the pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) were jailed pending trial, are likely to spark more concern among Turkey’s allies about President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s intolerance of dissent in the wake of a failed July 15 coup.

More than 110,000 officials, including judges, teachers, police and civil servants, have been detained or suspended following the botched coup. Erdogan’s critics say he is using the coup as a pretext to squash the opposition, while Ankara says the crackdown is necessary to root out terrorists.

The Cumhuriyet staff placed under arrest had been held earlier this week. They include Cumhuriyet’s editor-in-chief Murat Sabuncu, celebrated cartoonist Musa Kart and influential anti-Erdogan columnist Kadri Gursel — some of the most prominent names in Turkish journalism — the state-run Anadolu and private Dogan news agencies said.

The suspects are charged with links to the outlawed Kurdish militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the movement of US-based preacher Fethullah Gulen, blamed by Erdogan for the failed coup bid. Gulen denies the accusations.

Like the nine HDP MPs, the newspaper staff will now be held behind bars ahead of a trial, a date for which has yet to be set.

The arrests have heightened concern among Western allies about the political direction of Turkey, a NATO member and a buffer between Europe and the conflicts raging in Syria and Iraq.

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said she was “extremely worried” by the arrests, and raised her concerns in a telephone call with Turkey’s foreign and EU affairs ministers late on Friday. The United States, meanwhile, expressed “deep concern”.

Hours after Friday’s detentions, a car bomb killed 11 people and wounded more than 100 near a police station in the south-eastern city of Diyarbakir where some of the lawmakers were being held.

The government immediately blamed the PKK for the attack, but the Amaq news agency, which is linked to the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group, said that its fighters were behind the bombing, the SITE Intelligence Group said. There has so far been no comment from the PKK.

In a separate attack on Saturday, at least two children were killed and four more were wounded when a bomb went off in the south-eastern province of Sirnak. According to the local governor’s office, the bomb had been planted by PKK militants. The deadly blast occurred just hours after authorities appointed a new mayor to the Sirnak municipality in a move to replace municipal officials it accuses of supporting the PKK.

Turkish authorities have also sparked controversy by slapping restrictions on social media and messaging services like WhatsApp.

Users encountered problems on Friday and Saturday loading social media and also using Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections which people often use to circumvent such restrictions. -AFP </s> Amnesty International director among the six jailed for 'helping an armed terrorist organisation'.

Six people, including the director of Amnesty International in Turkey, were arrested by a court order on Tuesday for "helping an armed terrorist organisation", according to the state-run Anadolu Agency news outlet.

They were among the 10 who were detained in Istanbul earlier in July during a workshop on Buyukada, an island near the city.

The group comprised eight Turkish human rights activists, one Swedish trainer and one German trainer.

The Istanbul court ordered the other four be released on the condition of judicial control.

The activists had been questioned by the prosecutor since they were taken into custody on July 5.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused them of harbouring similar intentions to the perpetrators of a failed coup attempt last year.

That claim was rebuffed by Amnesty International, the rights group that has seen two of its top Turkey officials detained in a month. </s> Turkey's pro-Kurdish party has decided to halt its legislative activities in parliament following the arrest of nine of its lawmakers.

Yet Ayhan Bilgen, a spokesman for the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), told The Associated Press on Sunday that the party will not withdraw from parliament, saying that decision can only "be made in consultation with the people."

HDP co-leaders Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag were arrested Friday on terrorism-related charges, along with seven other lawmakers. The move prompted messages of concern from the U.S. and Europe that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is using the pursuit of terrorists to detain opposition members.

The HDP entered parliament last year as the nation's third-largest party. In May, Turkey's parliament voted to strip lawmakers of legal immunity, paving the way for the arrests. </s> Image copyright AP/Reuters Image caption Selahattin Demirtas (L) and Figen Yuksekdag have been detained as well as other MPs from their party

The joint leaders of Turkey's pro-Kurdish opposition party, People's Democracy (HDP), have been arrested along with at least nine other MPs.

Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag are accused of spreading propaganda for militants fighting the Turkish state.

Hours after Mr Demirtas was arrested in Diyarbakir, a car bomb killed eight people and injured more than 100.

Militants have been fighting for years to achieve independence for the Kurds, Turkey's biggest ethnic minority.

Turkey remains under a state of emergency that was imposed after a failed military coup in July.

The emergency allows President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his cabinet to bypass parliament when drafting new laws and to restrict or suspend rights and freedoms.

Image copyright Reuters Image caption The blast in Diyarbakir destroyed the fronts of buildings

Image copyright AP

Image copyright Reuters

A major escalation: Analysis by Mark Lowen, BBC Turkey correspondent

Image copyright AFP

The government says those detained had failed to respond to a summons for questioning and issued an arrest warrant for two other HDP MPs currently abroad.

This is a major escalation of a clampdown that has seen Kurdish media closed down and the mayor of Diyarbakir arrested.

Hopes of an end to Turkey's decades-long Kurdish problem have evaporated since a ceasefire with the [Kurdistan Workers' Party] PKK broke down in 2015, leading to a wave of tit-for-tat attacks.

Mr Demirtas elicited international support with his liberal politics but critics say he has failed to distance the party sufficiently from the PKK. Friday's detentions are likely to provoke more tension among Kurds - and more violence too.

Why were the party leaders arrested?

The government says they were detained for failing to co-operate with a counter-terrorism investigation, which the two leaders vowed to boycott in June.

Defending the arrests, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said: "They did not respect the law."

The MPs are also accused of spreading propaganda for the PKK, the Kurdish group suspected of a wave of recent attacks including Friday's car bomb.

Deemed a terrorist organisation by the US, the EU and Turkey, the PKK has been fighting the state since the 1970s in a war which has claimed at least 40,000 lives.

Can MPs really be arrested just like this in Turkey?

Turkish politicians normally have immunity from prosecution but this was removed from the HDP and some other MPs in May.

Last month, the joint mayors of Diyarbakir, Turkey's largest Kurdish-majority city, were also arrested as part of a terrorism investigation.

Is the HDP linked to the PKK?

While commonly seen as the main pro-Kurdish party, HDP is an eclectic grouping which also appeals to leftists, liberals, environmentalists, gay rights activists and pious Muslims. That explains why it is Turkey's third-largest party.

It entered parliament for the first time last year, winning 59 seats.

During the election campaign, it carried a moderate message despite dozens of attacks against party supporters and offices, culminating in a deadly attack on its largest election rally in Diyarbakir two days before the vote.

The party strongly denies any links to the PKK.

Mr Demirtas and others accuse President Erdogan of seeking to push the party out of parliament and increase his own power.

One MP, who is currently abroad, told the BBC the government was acting like Nazis.

"This crackdown tonight is nothing to do with procedural law, criminal law, any law whatsoever or the constitution," Ertugrul Kurkcu said. "This is an unlawful hijacking of HDP parliamentarians."

Turkey's HDP party goes mainstream </s> As Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria continues, so too does their policy of arresting anyone seen as even sort of opposed to the attack. 



The Turkish Interior Ministry now says 449 people have been detained for criticizing the war on social media, and 124 more detained for taking part in actual protests.

Riot police detain a demonstrator during a protest against Turkey’s military operation in Syria’s Afrin region, in Istanbul, Turkey

Turkey’s Erdogan government doesn’t have a lot of patience for dissent, or for Kurds.

Unsurprisingly, dissent about a war against Kurds is being cracked down on intensely. Erdogan’s spokesman warned that statements criticizing the war amount to statements “glorifying terrorism,” and that the government is just enforcing the law as written.

With Turkey’s largely state-run media praising the war, public support for it is still relatively strong.

Opposition is mostly in the ethnic Kurdish region, which Turkey is more than willing to crack down on at any rate, and political opponents.

When other NGOs issue statements against the war, as did a medical union in the country, President Erdogan has condemned them as traitors, and arrested 11 of their senior members for a statement calling for “peace immediately.”

With the war continuing and casualties rising, war exhaustion is inevitable. For now,however, expressing opposition to the conflict is a very dangerous crime indeed in Turkey. </s> PESHAWAR, Pakistan: In a second-grade classroom, decorated with colourful posters of letters, numbers and animals, students were reciting English sentences using the future tense. Down the hall, kindergartners were enjoying a lunchtime party with cupcakes and funny hats.

But something was missing from this picture of studious nurturing. In many classes at the Pak-Turk International School last week, the regular teachers from Turkey were absent. They had been banned from the premises after the Pakistani government abruptly announced on November 15 that they had five days to leave the country.

Since then, the expulsion orders against about 100 Turkish teachers and their families have been challenged in provincial courts, and most have been granted temporary visa extensions.

The Peshawar High Court issued a temporary injunction on the expulsions in November and later extended it until December 13.

But despite criticism from international rights groups and Pakistani educators, all expect to be forced to leave, and some said they fear being harassed and arrested if they return to Turkey.

“We are really sad about our teachers. They give us parties. They give us love. We don’t want them to go,” said Marosh Zishan, 8, whose English class was being taught by a substitute Pakistani teacher.

Asked what the second-graders had learnt from their Turkish teachers, Malisha Shaheed, 7, stood up eagerly. “Not to fight,” she said.

The teachers at Pak-Turk International in Peshawar, and at 27 other such schools with 11,000 students across Pakistan, have not been accused of doing anything wrong.

The private schools, established in the 1990s by Turkey’s Gulenist movement, are rated among the best in Pakistan. They meet British university exam standards, and many Pakistani professionals send their children there.

But this summer, the teachers were caught up in an international controversy, stemming from a failed military coup in Turkey in July. After the uprising was quelled, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan unleashed a crackdown in which thousands of academics, lawyers and political activists were arrested.

Erdogan also singled out the Gulenists as having influenced the army to rebel and denounced their leader, Fethullah Gulen, as a mastermind of the revolt. Gulen, 77, a Turkish Muslim cleric, has lived in exile in Pennsylvania for 17 years. He condemned the uprising, writing in the New York Times that his philosophy is “antithetical to armed rebellion.”

Still, Gulen loyalists had worked for years to infiltrate Turkish institutions, according to analysts in Turkey. Many in the police and judiciary used their positions to target military and political leaders, including Erdogan allies.

Erdogan’s international stature has plummeted since the crackdown, but he remains a valued ally of Pakistan. In mid-November he was welcomed here for a high-profile visit.

He addressed a session of Parliament, where he denounced the Gulenists as a “bloody terrorist group” and warned that they could also endanger Pakistan. Before arriving he requested that the teachers be expelled, and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif complied.

The Pak-Turk schools are part of Gulen’s Hizmet programme, which has educational and social welfare projects in numerous countries. Gulen’s teachings have a strong Islamic component, but Hizmet publications and members describe it as a “civil society movement” that promotes “human values” including empathy, mutual respect and community service.

Many Pakistani parents of Pak-Turk students have vocally protested the government’s move, participating in demonstrations in various cities over the past several weeks. They insist that the schools do not promote any radical religious ideas, and they praise the Turkish influence as building moral character in the young.

“My children have been going here for four years, and I have never heard anything about the Gulenists,” said Mohammad Zubair, a medical doctor and hospital official in Peshawar who said he chose Pak-Turk over several other highly ranked private schools. “They teach ethical values and build good citizens. This is completely unfair.”

Mohammad Aqeel, 24, who attended the Peshawar school and now teaches there, called the visa cancellations “a shameful event” that had compromised Pakistan’s independence and damaged its educational standards.

“There is no foreign ideology here,” he said. “I love this school. It grooms us to be good human beings as well as students.”

The Pakistani government has not fully explained its action, but government lawyers have described it as a “foreign policy matter” and noted that Pakistan has the right to not renew foreign visas.

Officials have also suggested that little harm is being done to the students, since the schools will remain open.

Critical analysts, however, said it was strictly a move to please Erdogan, who is close to Sharif and supports Pakistan in its rivalry with India.

Amnesty International condemned the expulsion order, saying Pakistan “needs more classrooms and more teachers, not a politically motivated decision to purge educators at the behest of the Turkish government.” Pakistan’s state school system is poorly funded and equipped, and millions of children work instead.

The Pak-Turk Educational Foundation immediately challenged the expulsion order in Pakistani courts, which have responded in various ways. The Islamabad High Court said the group should petition the Interior Ministry for visa extensions but noted that allowing foreigners to remain is “the sole prerogative of any state.”

Meanwhile, the teachers remain in limbo, suddenly jobless in Pakistan and fearful of what awaits them in Turkey. One faculty couple with two children, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal, said they now rarely leave the rented house they share with another Turkish family.

“If people at home know I work here, it will be enough to send me straight to jail,” said the husband, 30, who has taught math in PakTurk schools for the past several years. </s> Opposition leader began march 25 days ago to protest an MP's conviction for revealing state secrets and other arrests.

Turkish main opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu is preparing to hold a mass rally in Istanbul, marking the end of his 450km protest march from capital Ankara to the metropolis.

He started the "March for Justice" 25 days ago in protest of the conviction of Enis Berberoglu, an MP with his Republican People’s Party (CHP), and other recent arrests in Turkey.

Kilicdaroglu has been followed by thousands of supporters along the way, including CHP deputies.

Berberoglu was sentenced to 25 years in prison last month for allegedly revealing state secrets to journalists on the transportation of arms to Syria.

Kilicdaroglu said in an opinion article published in the New York Times on Friday that his supporters and he were marching for "democracy, justice and freedom from fear and authoritarian rule in Turkey".

He wrote: "If democracy and rule of law are suspended, if people are afraid to freely express their views, if legislators are in prison rather than in the parliament, if the courts are incapable of serving justice, we stand up and call for justice with our words, with our bodies on the streets."

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently slammed the march, saying that the CHP is collaborating with "terrorist" groups and forces that incite such groups against Turkey.

"If you are launching a march for terrorists and for their supporters, something which you have never thought about doing against terrorist groups, you can convince no one that your aim is justice," he said.

"This situation, which anyone who in their right mind can see clearly, is part of traps set up in Syria, Iraq, the Gulf, and Europe against our country," he added.

On the 25th day of his march, Kilicdaroglu is expected to walk from the neighbourhood of Dragos to Maltepe in Istanbul, where he will hold a rally that his party says it expects over a million people to attend.

Berberoglu was convicted of revealing state secrets by passing images to a newspaper appearing to show the search of National Intelligence Organisation (MIT) trucks en route to Syria in January 2014.

He is the first CHP deputy to be imprisoned in recent years, while mass arrests have targeted MPs of the pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP) in recent months, including its leaders.

Turkey has been in a state of emergency after a coup attempt last summer which killed around 300 people and led to arrests and purges targeting tens of thousands of civil servants as well as journalists and opposition activists.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan calls 15 peaceful anti-war protestors arrested last month at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul terrorists and says they will not be allowed to complete their education.