Turkish capital Ankara’s controversial mayor Melih Gökçek continues to attack the city’s Middle East Technical University (METU), one of the top public universities of the country.
Encompassing a 3,500-hectare in total, the METU Forest’s 24-hectare forest land is under the danger of destruction due to a highway project of the metropolitan municipality governed by Gökçek from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Prof Dr Mustafa Verşan Kök, METU’s rector, made a statement on Aug. 15 regarding the issue: “The METU land is an ecosystem, 87 percent of which is encompassed with forestland. A cut-and-cover method would impose an irremediable damage on this land that has a status of grade 1 natural site area.”
Arguing that the road work costs will be much higher even if the part of university’s forest land is destroyed, Prof Kök continued, “We intend that a 2,1-km-length tunnel passing through METU should not be carried out using a cut-and-cover method.”
METU rector Kök warns that the highway project of 4,8 km length and 50-meter width projected to be passed through the METU land will lead to the destruction of a 24-hectare forest land within the university.
WHY THE AKP GOVERNMENT ATTACKS METU
METU has witnessed numerous political protests throughout its history. As a university in which a large number of socialist and revolutionary students and academics studied, METU has been targeted particularly by the right wing and Islamist governments for many decades.
Turkey’s President and chair of the ruling Justice and Development Party Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has never hidden his ideological animosity against METU despite the university became the only Turkish university that achieved to be among the top 100 universities of the world.
When the then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan participated in a ceremony that took place at a METU campus for the launching of Turkish satellite Göktürk-2 in December 2012, around 8,000 riot police officers and dozens of water cannon vehicles attacked METU students since they protested the government.
Besides the AKP government-led political repression towards METU students and academics, Ankara’s controversial mayor Melih Gökçek, who is famous with his scandalous Twits, has always targeted METU campuses with the aim of zoning the green forest lands of the university for highways and construction.
Despite the legal struggle of METU administration to prevent the pro-market attacks of the Ankara Metropolitan Municipality, Mayor Gökçek has continued to ignite provocations against the university.
Along with the support of locals living in the neighbourhoods around the university, whenever METU students, graduates and labourers united to protest the AKP-led attacks, the government’s police forces laid an ambush inside the university forestland and attacked the protesters with gas canisters and rubber bullets.
