Turkey's 2016 Peace Petition Arrests and Chomsky's Response

Turkey Detains Academics as Chomsky Takes Aim at Erdoğan's Brutality, Hypocrisy

Noam Chomsky was among the international scholars who signed the January 2016 peace petition and publicly answered President Erdoğan's criticism. (Photo: YouTube/file)

In mid-January 2016, Turkish police detained academics who had signed a petition calling on the government to stop its military operations in Kurdish-majority towns in the country's southeast. The petition, titled "We will not be a party to this crime", was signed by more than a thousand scholars in Turkey and several hundred abroad, including the American linguist Noam Chomsky. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan denounced the signatories, Chomsky answered him in public, and the case grew into one of the most serious academic-freedom disputes in modern Turkey, with prosecutions that lasted for years.

What happened in January 2016

The petition was read out at press conferences in Ankara and Istanbul on 11 January 2016 by a group calling itself Academics for Peace. Within days, prosecutors opened investigations on possible charges of terrorist propaganda and insulting the Turkish state.

On 15 January, The Guardian reported that at least a dozen academics had been detained and that paperwork was being prepared for others. Turkey's state news agency Anadolu put the number at 18: fifteen from Kocaeli University and three from Uludağ University in Bursa. Most were questioned and released, but the investigations continued. The US ambassador to Turkey, John Bass, described the crackdown as chilling, and students at several campuses rallied in defence of their teachers.

Some signatories told journalists that nationalist groups had circulated their photos on social media and in leaflets, labelling them supporters of terrorism and threatening them in their own cities and universities.

What the petition asked for

The text, published in English by the independent news site Bianet, focused on the round-the-clock curfews imposed in towns and districts such as Sur in Diyarbakır, Silvan, Nusaybin, Cizre and Silopi. Residents had been confined to their homes for weeks while security forces fought militants in the streets with heavy weapons.

In summary, the signatories:

accused the state of violating the right to life, liberty and security and the ban on ill-treatment, under both Turkish law and international treaties;
used strong language, describing the operations as a deliberate massacre and deportation of Kurdish and other residents;
asked for the curfews to be lifted, for those responsible for abuses to be punished and for victims to be compensated;
called for independent national and international observers to be allowed into the region;
urged the government to return to peace negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

The wording was deliberately sharp, and critics in Turkey argued that it ignored the PKK's own violence. But nothing in the petition called for violence, which is why press-freedom and academic groups saw the prosecutions as punishment for speech.

The background: a peace process that collapsed

To understand the anger on both sides, it helps to know what had happened just before. Turkey and the PKK had been in a fragile peace process since 2013. It broke down in July 2015, and fighting returned, this time largely inside towns, where PKK-linked youth groups dug trenches and declared "self-rule". The army responded with curfews and urban operations that lasted months and left whole neighbourhoods in ruins. Human rights groups and the United Nations later documented heavy civilian casualties and mass displacement.

The PKK is listed as a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the European Union and the United States. That listing is why the government treated criticism of its operations as sympathy for terrorism, and why the signatories insisted that calling for peace is not the same as supporting armed groups.

Erdoğan's response and Chomsky's reply

Erdoğan reacted with unusual fury. He called the signatories "pseudo-academics", accused them of a treasonous mentality and described their request for foreign observers as colonialism. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu suggested they had aligned themselves with terrorists, and the chief prosecutor in Kocaeli accused them of insulting the moral integrity of the state.

The president singled out Chomsky, the MIT linguist and long-time critic of US and allied foreign policy, and invited him to visit Turkey to see the situation for himself. Chomsky declined in an email to The Guardian, saying that if he went, "it will not be on his invitation, but as frequently before at the invitation of the many courageous dissidents" who had long been under attack.

He went further, linking the crackdown to Turkey's policy in Syria. Responding to the government's blaming of ISIS for a recent bombing in Istanbul, he accused Erdoğan of having aided that group and the al-Nusra Front. Of the attacks on the signatories, he wrote: "He then launched a tirade against those who condemn his crimes against Kurds, who happen to be the main ground force opposing Isis." Turkey rejected the accusation of helping ISIS, though Western officials and journalists at the time did criticise Ankara for allowing fighters and supplies across its long Syrian border.

What happened to the signatories

The January detentions were only the start. Investigations were opened against all of the original signatories, and more than 600 were eventually charged, mostly under Turkey's anti-terror law. In most completed trials the courts handed down sentences of 15 months to three years. Many sentences were suspended, but dozens were not, and some academics went to prison.

After the failed coup attempt of July 2016, the government ruled by emergency decree, and hundreds of signatories were dismissed from their universities, often with passports cancelled and a ban on public-sector work. Some left the country to continue their careers abroad.

The turning point came in July 2019, when Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled, in a closely split decision, that the signatories' freedom of expression had been violated. Lower courts began to acquit defendants that September, and by the end of that month 171 academics had been found not guilty by 17 different courts. For many, however, the years of trials, lost jobs and travel bans could not be undone.

Why the case still matters

The Academics for Peace case is now widely cited in studies of academic freedom. It showed how terrorism laws can be stretched to cover a signature on a letter, and how quickly a university career can end when political speech is treated as a security threat. It also showed the limits of that approach: the country's own highest court eventually found that the petition was protected expression.

For readers outside Turkey, the episode is a reminder that petitions and open letters, however strongly worded, are part of normal democratic debate. Whether one agrees with the signatories' description of events or not, the right to say it without facing prison is what protects every side in a dispute.

It also explains why international names such as Chomsky, Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek added their signatures: support from abroad drew attention to colleagues who carried far greater personal risk by signing from inside the country.

Sources: Original report by Common Dreams (January 2016); The Guardian; petition text at Bianet; Wikipedia, Academics for Peace.

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