International Herald Tribune, France
Dec 31 2006
In Turkey, questioning Ataturk lands liberal academic in trouble
The Associated PressPublished: December 31, 2006
ANKARA, Turkey: When Atilla Yayla, a professor of political science,
questioned the legacy of the revered founder of modern Turkey,
nationalists called him a traitor and his university suspended him.
He couldn’t eat or sleep for days.
"There was a lynching campaign against me," he recalled recently in
his office surrounded by books on liberal thought.
Yayla said he was punished for shattering a taboo: daring to
criticize Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a leader so loved and idolized that
his portraits hang in all government offices, his statues adorn parks
and squares, and his ideas are still the republic’s most sacred
principles 68 years after his death.
"As an academic, I must be free to think, to search and share
findings," Yayla, 50, said in an interview at the Ankara-based
Association for Liberal Thinking, an organization he co-founded in
1994. "If Turkey wants to be a civilized country, academics must be
able to scientifically criticize and evaluate Ataturk’s ideas."
But his ordeal shows how Turkish universities, most of them
state-controlled, are not always places where ideas float freely.
Anyone deviating from the set of principles – including a strict
interpretation of secularism – inspired by Ataturk and closely
guarded by the military, the bureaucracy and judiciary, is chastised
and in some cases, sacked.
His troubles are a reminder of how Turkey, despite aspiring to join
the European Union, is still grappling with basic freedoms – one of
the main problems it must address if it wants to realize its European
ambitions.
Novelist Orhan Pamuk, before winning the Nobel Prize for literature,
was forced to stand trial after a group of ultranationalist lawyers
accused him of "insulting Turkishness" for telling a Swiss newspaper
that 1 million Armenians were killed on Turkish territory – a
historical detail disputed by many Turks.
The trial was dropped on a technicality.
Another writer, Ipek Calislar, also went on trial and was acquitted
in December of charges that he insulted Ataturk by claiming in a
biography of Ataturk’s estranged wife that the leader fled an
assassination attempt dressed in women’s clothing.
Ataturk was a soldier and statesman who founded secular and
Westward-looking Turkey from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923
after emerging as a national hero for his efforts to save the country
from occupying powers.
He set about on a series of secular reforms that imposed Western
laws, replaced Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, banned Islamic
dress and granted women the right to vote. The country he founded
frequently is touted as an example that a democracy can exist in a
predominantly Muslim country.
Regulations require that his portraits hang in government offices and
schools, but Turks’ affection for him is so great that many also have
his picture in their homes, shops and offices.
Life stops for a minute every year at 9:05 a.m. on Nov. 10 – the time
of his death – with sirens wailing, motorists honking their horns and
people standing in silence to mourn Ataturk.
Yayla insisted he was not insulting Ataturk but questioning his
legacy, as well as the rigid way some followers interpret his
principles to oppose liberal reforms and impose strict secular laws
such as the ban on headscarves at universities.
"Some people have created a cult of Ataturk, but by doing this what
they want to do is not to revere Ataturk but rather to … give
themselves an undisputed position in political life," he said. "That
is what I cannot accept."
Yayla said in his Nov. 18 speech that the era of one-party rule under
Ataturk, from 1925 to 1945, was not as progressive as the official
ideology would have Turks believe but was "regressive in some
respects."
He criticized the statues and pictures of Ataturk, saying Europeans
would be baffled to see the portraits of just one man on the walls.
Ankara’s Gazi University was inundated with fax messages accusing
Yayla of treason and demanding that he be sacked after the speech,
delivered at a panel discussion organized by the youth wing of Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted party in the Aegean
port of Izmir.
Gazi’s chancellor, Kadri Yamac, bowed to the pressure and temporarily
removed Yayla from his teaching post pending the outcome of an
investigation, saying a professor "does not have to like Ataturk but
I cannot allow a person who is opposed to the Republic’s main
principles to educate students."
"We are ashamed of … the so-called scientist to whom insulting
Ataturk is freedom of speech," Lale Sivgin, a columnist for the
nationalist Yenicag newspaper, wrote in November.
In separate commentary in December, she accused the professor of
forgetting an allegiance some academics make to Ataturk when
receiving their diplomas.
"Since (he is) preoccupied with the Ataturk pictures that hang on
walls instead of serving the country, it is obvious that (he has)
forgotten his pledge," Sivgin wrote.
The professor also has his supporters. A group of protesters wearing
masks bearing Yayla’s image sent the university chancellor a parcel
containing sticky tape – to "gag professors."
Academics signed a petition to have him reinstated and to counter
petitions, mostly by nationalists, who say Yayla should not be
allowed to teach.
Nevertheless, the professor said he was so upset that he was rushed
to hospital with high blood pressure.
"I couldn’t sleep for four nights and I couldn’t eat for five days,
and in the end my body collapsed," Yayla said. "They didn’t defend my
academic freedom; instead, they wanted to execute me without a
trial."