A Turkish court has sentenced academic Cenk Yiğiter to one year, five months in prison for allegedly insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in a social media post that did not mention him by name, according to a report by online news outlet Gazete Duvar on Friday.
Yiğiter was previously dismissed from his job for signing a petition calling for a peaceful end to Turkey’s three-decade-old conflict with Kurdish militants in 2016.
Although Turkish courts usually suspend sentences for the scores of people convicted of insulting Erdoğan in a first-time offense, the judges in this case imposed a custodial sentence.
“When someone said ‘Reis’ in the past, I used to think of Chief Temel,” Yiğiter said on Twitter, referring to the cartoon character Popeye, who is known as Chief Temel in Turkey. “Reis,” meaning chief, is a term that has come to refer to Erdoğan, who has run Turkey for the last 15 years. “Now, I think of an idiot,” Yiğiter said.
Yiğiter, who was dismissed from the Ankara University law faculty under a state of emergency decree-law, has also not been allowed to study at the communication faculty of the same university despite passing the entrance examination.
Ankara University added an article to a regulation issued on Aug. 8, 2017 and said students who earned the right to register at the university shall not have been dismissed from public service.
According to a BBC Turkish report, a total of 23,427 academics have been affected by a state of emergency that was declared following a failed coup attempt on July 15, 2016.
The report said at least 23,427 academics either lost their jobs at universities when their contracts were terminated or were dismissed from their positions, or the universities where they worked were closed down by the government after Sept. 1, 2016.
According to a report by Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency on July 21, police teams under the command of the cybercrime unit have determined the existence of 126,000 social media accounts related to alleged terrorist organizations in the last two years.
The report said about 50,000 out of 68,000 profiled social media accounts that allegedly posted pro-coup messages in the wake of a coup bid in July 2016 belong to alleged members of the Gülen movement.
According to the report, 17,000 of the social media accounts are allegedly linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), while a thousand of them are said to be connected to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
It was also claimed that 60 percent of social media posts believed to be supportive of “terrorist organizations” have been made by alleged members of the Gülen movement. The Turkish government led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has labeled the pacifist Gülen movement as a “terrorist organization,” calling it “FETÖ.”
