The Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) released a statement on Sept. 12 regarding the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality’s recent attack on Middle East Technical University (METU) forests for a new highway project.
TKP indicated to the agreement between the Justice and Development Party-led (AKP) Ankara municipality and METU rector Mustafa Verşan Kök in the deforestation project of university forest. Ankara Metropolitan Municipality raided Middle East Technical University (METU) forests last Saturday late at night following the agreement between the METU rectorate and the municipality regarding the new highway project.
"Mayor Melih Gökçek’s unlawfulness, greed for money, anti-nature stance and bigotry is already a widely-known fact. METU rector Mustafa Verşan Kök, known with his Republican and secular identity, put his stamp on history for collaborating with Gökçek in this massacre," the statement said.
Emphasizing that this collaborationist culture opened the beautiful campus to the plunder of pro-market politicians, TKP points out to the responsibility of Rector Kök who approved the AKP’s destructive plans.
"True, AKP destroyed the Republic, religionized the social life, turned [Turkey] into an unbearable country, and dragged the country to war scenarios… In doing so, however, AKP took strength from this capitalist system," the TKP statement set forth.
Indicating to the capitalist mindset in the destruction of METU forests, TKP said: "Gökçek and his collaborator Rector Kök are guilty of the METU forest massacre. Nevertheless, as long as this system, which could gather reactionary Gökçek and so-called republican Kök around the same table, does not change, those trees slaughtered at METU will not be the last examples in Turkey."
The Communist Party of Turkey concluded the statement with a call to the residents of Ankara to organize and struggle against this system which does not only attack METU but also leads to the massacre of the whole country.
The open ideological enmity of the ruling AKP government towards the revolutionary legacy of METU had stirred on several occasions provocations of the Mayor Gökçek and protests of the METU students and academics. When the then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan participated in a ceremony that took place at the METU campus for the launching of Turkish satellite Göktürk-2 in December 2012, around 8000 riot police officers attacked METU students since they protested the government. Another mass protest in the near past occurred when some part of the METU forest had been destroyed during the construction of a boulevard in 2013.
