On 5 February 2025, two weeks after Donald Trump assumed the function of US president, Argonotlar (“Argonauts”), a queer artwork publication in Turkey, issued an pressing letter to its readers.
“Final week, we have been going to use for a fund from america Embassy, which goals to develop cultural co-operation between Turkey and america,” the letter started. “We drafted our software on Monday, made revisions, and whereas we have been engaged on the price range on Wednesday night, we got here throughout an announcement by US President Donald Trump on the fund’s official web site, stating that the funds overseas had been annulled.
Worldwide funds and help mechanisms have lengthy been a lifeline for progressive publications in Turkey reminiscent of Argonotlar. They’ve been significantly important since 2014, the 12 months Recep Tayyip Erdoğan grew to become president and his authorities started waging a tradition warfare on anybody it deemed marginal and deviant. Leftist activists, LGBTQ+ teams, feminists, secularist Kurds, journalists and students are among the many focused teams.
By means of scholarships, endowments and funds from overseas, journalistic and publishing initiatives and establishments may retain some type of independence.
Columbia College, 22 April 2024. Picture: SWinxy / Supply: Wikimedia Commons
Of their letter, Argonotlar’s editors warned that US monetary help for Turkey’s marginalised sectors was “shrinking one after the other”. It went on to say: “This example is crushing on civil society and area of interest publications like Argonotlar, which depend on monetary help.”
Kültigin Kağan Akbulut, the publication’s founding editor, informed Index that Turkey’s unbiased media and NGO sectors entered “a brand new period” after the coup try on 15 July 2016, which Erdoğan used to criminalise numerous sectors of society that opposed his regime. Trump’s second time period, in keeping with Akbulut, will provoke a equally devastating period for these establishments, with solely these which might be financially supported by subscriptions or their readers capable of climate the storm.
“Now we’re getting into a totally completely different section, one which we’re fully unfamiliar with,” he stated. “Impartial media shops and NGOs that depend on their readers, their circles and their [own work] will survive whereas others will, sadly, bid farewell to readers.”
Just a few weeks after Argonotlar issued its plea, Gazete Duvar (“The Wall Newspaper”), which was launched in 2016, ceased publication, citing monetary difficulties. Turkey’s government-controlled media was jubilant. Takvim, a newspaper owned by a pro-government enterprise group, wrote: “The choice to shut down Gazete Duvar got here within the wake of the abolition of america Company for Worldwide Improvement (USAID). This construction, which stirred social fault traces and fed inside conflicts in numerous international locations, can be recognized in Turkey for the media organisations it has been funding.”
Takvim claimed it was “the CIA’s area operational instrument for a few years”, cheered how “the Wall is taken down!” and famous how Trump’s former political adviser, Elon Musk, described USAID as a “legal organisation”.
Whereas Trump’s actions, reminiscent of his determination to formally shutter USAID in March, have obtained related acclaim amongst Erdoğan’s community, his makes an attempt to deport worldwide college students who’ve voiced pro-Palestinian views have been met with relative silence in Ankara.
On 25 March, after six masked plainclothes brokers from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained 30-year-old Tufts College pupil Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish authorities spokesperson stated it was “an open regression for American democracy”; however Erdoğan, who below regular circumstances could be infuriated by such a transfer, didn’t remark.
“Normally, Erdoğan is enraged with [the] repression of pro-Palestinian speech within the West – that’s his meat and potatoes,” stated Howard Eissenstat, chair of the historical past division at St Lawrence College in New York and a scholar at Stockholm College’s Institute for Turkish Research.
“These are the kinds of points Erdoğan loves to speak about: the perfidy and the hypocrisy of the West. ‘Each time they criticise us, they’re being hypocritical!’ That’s a part of his model. [But] he has manifestly not achieved that,” he stated.
Eissenstat analysed the protection by Anadolu, the state information company, the place such tales would normally be entrance and centre. This time, he stated, “they’ve been very delicate”.
“I feel that boils right down to geopolitics. The federal government doesn’t wish to decide a combat with Trump. They’re pondering, ‘We hope for higher offers; we hope to purchase F35s; we aren’t going to chunk that apple’.”
In March, Eissenstat and two different Turkey consultants – Lisel Hintz and Nick Danforth – revealed an essay in The Atlantic headlined “We Research Repression in Turkey. Now We See it Right here”. They warned readers: “As Individuals who comply with Turkish politics carefully, now we have spent the previous 20 years decrying the rise of authoritarianism in Turkey. We now have pointed to repeated crackdowns on free speech, together with the common use of safety forces to arrest and intimidate college students. So we watched with explicit horror as our authorities despatched masked brokers to arrest a Turkish pupil due to her political views.”
Amid Trump intensifying his assaults on US schools for alleged antisemitic bias, Harvard College dismissed Cemal Kafadar, the Turkish director of its Centre for Center Japanese Research, in March after the centre confronted criticism that a few of its programming had didn’t characterize Israeli views. Following this, a Turkish authorities spokesperson accused Harvard of “overtly assaulting scientific thought”.
However the assault on Harvard carried echoes of the assault on educational freedom in Turkey. Since 2021, Istanbul’s Boğaziçi College, one of many nation’s most prestigious schools, has witnessed widespread protests in opposition to its government-appointed rector, who shut down its progressive LGBTQ+ membership, fired students who have been vital of Erdoğan, and allowed a police presence on the campus to detain any pupil he deemed a risk to security. College students say even kissing on campus has change into problematic.
In a 2021 convention, Kafadar famous how his colleagues at Boğaziçi have been struggling below these circumstances and outlined the occasions as a “fixed state of oppression, a state of torment that’s regularly rising in dose with a way of revenge”. He recounted how his colleagues at Harvard had informed him that Trump was “presently finding out Erdoğan, Modi and Orbán on the difficulty of how one can take care of universities and the media, attempting to study what he can swiftly [do to] deal with them if he wins the 2024 election”.
Efe Murad Balıkçıoğlu, a analysis affiliate at Harvard’s Centre for Center Japanese Research, stated the scenario for arts departments basically is dire within the USA. Faculties have been slicing again on hiring and shutting or freezing jobs. Six jobs which Balıkçıoğlu utilized for have closed or been placed on maintain, together with tenure-track (which gives a path of development at a college), non-tenure-track, part-time and lecturer positions.
“It doesn’t seem like there shall be any tenure-track positions within the subsequent few years,” he stated. “Center Japanese research is the one getting [hit the hardest]. To any extent further, worldwide college students must suppose twice about getting into or leaving the nation as a result of the federal government is threatening to revoke visas. It’s additionally attainable, even doubtless, that they’ll be blocked in the event that they participate in political actions.”
Balıkçıoğlu predicted this might set off a migration of US-based teachers to Europe. “Columbia’s historical past division, which has a pupil physique of round 20 [PhD students] yearly, accepted fewer than 10 for its doctoral programme this 12 months,” he stated.
“Equally, fewer worldwide college students have been accepted this 12 months [across US universities] attributable to visa issues, and the variety of college students, particularly within the humanities, has decreased. It could be tough for Turkish teachers to search out tenure-track jobs or analysis grants if their analysis focuses on the Center East and if they don’t glorify Israel.”
US-based artists from Turkey are additionally evaluating their conditions. The Kurdish artist Şener Özmen, who received a grant in 2016 from the Institute of Worldwide Training’s Artist Safety Fund, an American initiative that gives grants to threatened artists, stated he was involved by how the USA “can and does deport you with out query”.
Özmen, who now lives in Wilmette, Illinois, pointed to similarities between Erdoğan and Trump’s hostility towards the media. “Trump focused the mainstream media via the discourse of ‘faux information’ whereas Erdoğan focused the antigovernment media via the discourse of treason and hostility to faith.”
Nevertheless, he stated there was a distinction between the free speech landscapes in Turkey and the USA. To this point, regardless of Trump’s pressures, the media within the USA has largely remained unbiased, educational freedom has been extensively maintained, and universities have retained their autonomy (though Trump’s newest risk to take away federal funding from universities that don’t comply along with his calls for is eroding that independence).
In Erdoğan’s Turkey, in distinction, “a big portion of media shops have been transferred to capital teams with ties to the federal government. Establishments just like the Council of Increased Training [a government agency] have established direct political management over universities. Extra importantly, throughout Trump’s first presidential time period, opposition journalists or teachers weren’t topic to legal prosecution or dismissed from their posts”.
The Turkish authorities has dismissed 1000’s of teachers via statutory decree investigations and had dozens of them arrested.
Fatma Göçek is amongst these persecuted Turkish students. A tenured professor on the College of Michigan, in January 2016 the esteemed sociologist signed a peace petition alongside 1,127 different students titled “We Will Not Be a Social gathering to This Crime”, in an effort to draw the general public’s consideration to violence in Turkey.
Since then, Göçek has been unable to journey to the nation. “They stated that there was a listing of 40 folks within the Ministry of Justice concerning students and that I used to be 14th on that record,” she informed Index. “I haven’t been coming to Turkey for the previous decade. I’ve few alternatives to go to Turkey; I can solely meet with Turks nearly.”
Over the previous decade, Göçek has labored with professor Kader Konuk, who based the Academy in Exile in 2017. The initiative gives fellowships to students from around the globe who’re at-risk in order that they will proceed their analysis in Germany. Göçek additionally contributes to Students at Threat, a US-based community of 530 increased schooling establishments throughout 42 international locations.
“I’m working with all these students who’re attempting to return to the USA from Turkey,” Göçek stated. “Will they be capable of keep right here or not? I don’t know.”
Not too long ago, she invited a Fulbright Scholar who focuses on the political actions of Ottoman Kurds to conduct analysis at her college, however stated that he would doubtless not go to Michigan due to the bureaucratic hurdles and would as an alternative head to England to do his analysis at Oxford College.
Sarphan Uzunoğlu, an assistant professor at Izmir College of Economics, stated the present assault on educational freedoms within the USA was a litmus check for freedom of expression within the West. International locations that have been as soon as involved with Turkey’s trajectory in the direction of authoritarianism at the moment are present process an analogous transition.
“The truth that international locations that stated ‘We’re involved’ when these items have been taking place in Turkey are experiencing the identical scenario is immediately associated to the cruel flip within the world political local weather,” he stated.
“As for the way this makes me really feel, as a former immigrant who later returned to his nation, it’s scary even to think about the worry Rümeysa Öztürk skilled,” he stated, referencing the not too long ago detained Tufts pupil. “Being detained in an immigration detention centre abroad isn’t an peculiar scenario.”
Eissenstat, the professor at St. Lawrence College in New York, has taught three courses on Palestine this 12 months. “I wouldn’t be instructing them if I have been a inexperienced card holder,” he stated. “Not as a result of I really feel I’m saying something offensive or doing something unsuitable, however moderately as a result of we don’t know why the persons are chosen for focusing on, which is supposed to intimidate all of us.”
He in contrast the scenario within the USA to Turkey’s personal educational disaster that intensified within the mid-2010s, when the crimson traces about what one may say and write grew to become unclear.
“Arbitrary arrests – and the arbitrary punishment or focusing on of 1 individual, placing them in jail – is essential to authoritarian rule,” he stated. “The authoritarian rule doesn’t attempt to punish everyone. It tries to create these singular instances that make everyone pause.”
The authoritarian ways of the Turkish and US governments are more and more resembling one another. As Erdoğan and Trump borrow from one another’s playbooks on a number of fronts, college students, students, journalists and any residents keen to voice their views could possibly be dealing with the ominous prospect of a fine-tuned, unified and globally accepted autocracy within the close to future.
