UNIVERSITY SUSPENDS TURKISH PROFESSOR
Suzan Fraser

Associated Press
Dec 5 2006

ANKARA, Turkey – A university has suspended one of its professors for
remarks he made about Turkey’s revered founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
an official said Monday.

The suspension of professor Atilla Yayla has brought into sharp
focus the country’s ambivalence toward freedom of speech even as it
intensifies its campaign to join the European Union.

Ankara’s Gazi University suspended Yayla last week after the political
scientist criticized Ataturk at a conference in the Aegean coastal city
of Izmir, an official at the state-run university said on condition of
anonymity because civil servants are barred from speaking to reporters
without prior authorization.

News reports said the professor was suspended after he referred to
the late soldier-statesman as "that man," criticized the statues
and pictures of Ataturk adorning government offices, and said an
era of one-party rule under Ataturk had led to "regression rather
than progress."

Turkey’s European Union membership bid looks increasingly troubled over
what European officials say is a slowdown in reforms, including in free
speech, and on Turkey’s refusal to open up its ports and airports to
EU member Cyprus. The European Commission recommended last week that
the EU freeze negotiations on eight of 35 policy areas in Turkey’s
membership talks, which began in October 2005.

Earlier this year, novelist Orhan Pamuk was forced to stand trial,
after a group of ultra-nationalist lawyers accused him of "insulting
Turkishness" for telling a Swiss newspaper that 1 million Armenians
were killed on Turkish territory. The trial was dropped on a
technicality under heavy pressure from the European Union. Pamuk
later won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Ataturk founded secular and Westward-looking Turkey from the ashes
of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, after saving the country from invading
Western powers.

Regulations require that his portraits hang in government offices and
schools, but the affection of Turks is so great toward their founder
that many also hang his picture in their homes, shops and offices.

At the same time, more and more Turks are questioning his legacy and
the rigid way some of his followers – hard-liners inside the military,
the bureaucracy and the judiciary – are interpreting his principles
to oppose liberal reforms and change.

The university’s chancellor on Monday defended his decision to
temporarily suspend Yayla until an investigation is completed.

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,"
Yamac told Vatan newspaper in an interview published Monday.

Yayla’s comments have divided Turkey. A group of protesters sent
Yamac a parcel containing sticky tape over the weekend, so that he
may "gag professors." Others petitioned the university saying Yayla
should not be allowed to teach.