Turkey arrests 12 academics for signing declaration
Turkey arrests 12 academics for signing a petition that calls on Ankara to end its military campaign against Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in the country's southeast.
The academics are among more than 1,200 people from 90 Turkish universities who last week signed the declaration, Turkish news channel NTV reported Friday.
Police are looking to arrest seven others in western Turkey's Kocaeli Province.
Prosecutors launched an investigation into the petition that was also signed by some foreign scholars, including US author and linguist Noam Chomsky and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.
The signatories are facing accusations ranging from “terrorist propaganda” and “inciting people to hatred, violence and breaking the law” to “insulting Turkish institutions and the Turkish Republic,” according to the official Anatolia news agency.
If convicted, some 1,128 Turkish signatories of the petition could face between one and five years in prison.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu had earlier denounced the signatories for supporting what they called terrorism.
Rights activists, however, criticized Ankara, saying it should accept the declaration on account of freedom of speech.
“Turkey’s PM - himself an academic - apparently does not recognize the right to free speech or academic freedom,” Emma Sinclair-Webb, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), wrote on Twitter.
Violence flared between the PKK militant group and the Turkish army last July and shattered a fragile two-and-a-half-year ceasefire between the two sides.
The Human Rights Foundation of Turkey said recently that as many as 162 civilians have been killed in the restive regions placed under a government-imposed curfew since August 2015.
The PKK launched its militancy against Turkey in 1984. So far, more than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict.
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