Dissent

As the sun set over Istanbul on the last Friday in January 2021, it was easy to forget that Boğaziçi University was surrounded by a police barricade. Students gathered on the South Campus, as they had before the pandemic. An exhibition of artworks protesting the government sprawled across the roundabout in front of the rector's office. Bands and DJs played music while students laughed and danced, reveling in a few hours of normalcy at the end of a month that had been anything but.

Students and faculty had been protesting since the first week of January, when the Turkish president named Melih Bulu, a ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) operative, trustee rector of Boğaziçi, the top public university in Istanbul and an enclave for dissent. Though these kinds of encroachments on academic freedom aren't new in Turkey, for many, Bulu's appointment was a step too far. And when government officials began attacking students for their identities, calling them "LGBT perverts" and "terrorists," the protests became a symbol of the government's assaults on not only academic freedom but on progressive culture as a whole.

The exhibition was organized by a student art collective that wanted to give people the chance to express their grievances with the government in a creative way. For a week, they displayed paintings, photography, and sculptures around the quad. The collective received so many submissions that they had to lay some pieces on the ground. That Friday evening, the students felt they had pulled off a successful show.

But as the hilltop campus began to darken, whispers made their way through the crowd. A campaign against the exhibition had started circulating on Twitter. In response to one of the pieces, which replaced the Kaaba, a building in Mecca and the holiest site in Islam, with the Turkish folklore figure Şahmaran alongside the LGBTQ+ rainbow flag and the trans pride flag, Ali Erbaş, the president of Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs, condemned the "boundless attack against our holy place, the Kaaba, and our Islamic values." Other government officials soon followed suit. The students had grown up under the AKP, and they knew what catching the ire of the [End Page 153] government meant. They stopped the music, packed up the exhibition, and made their way to the exit, hoping to avoid trouble.

In a speech to the gathered students, Hazar Kolancalı, a member of the art collective, said she and the other members of the collective were likely going to be arrested, but that the exhibition had been "beautiful."

At the campus gates, police officers waited in riot gear. Later the students would learn that two other students, Doğu Demirtaş and Selahattin Can Uğuzeş, had already been arrested when they tried to report to the police that they were being followed. When Kolancalı reached the gates, officers called out her name and rushed to arrest her and Sena Nur Baş, another member of the collective. Handcuffs were tightened around their wrists. Demirtaş and Uğuzeş were imprisoned, while Nur Baş and Kolancalı were put under house arrest. At midnight, Minister of the Interior Süleyman Soylu tweeted, "We've arrested the four LGBT perverts who disrespected the Great Kaaba!"

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