Turkish researcher becomes her own subject
As a political scientist studying the relationship between academia and government, Simten Coşar knew a lot about the ways in which official ideology can undermine academic independence.
Her doctoral thesis was a study of the state and the intellectual in Turkey. As a professor in Ankara, she advised graduate students, wrote articles and books and lectured widely on politics, media and the academy. A self-defined structuralist and feminist, Coşar grounded her work in both fact and theory.
She was also involved with Scholars at Risk, an international network that provides support for threatened academics around the world. From the relative safety of Turkey, she wanted to show solidarity for colleagues in authoritarian states.
Then, in January 2016, things suddenly got personal.
That was when Coşar joined 1,128 Turkish academics in signing a declaration, titled “We Will Not Be a Party to this Crime,” calling for the government to stop its attacks against minority Kurds. Soon more than 2,200 would sign.
The reaction to the declaration was swift, led by extreme nationalist groups with ties to the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “There was a public campaign accusing the signatories of supporting terrorist activities,” Coşar recalled from her office at the Cornell Institute for European Studies(CIES).
“Just with a click, I was turned into a field of research myself,” she said. “It was what we had been talking about in the abstract turned into practice.”
Across Turkey, university administrators began firing faculty members after hasty hearings. “Some of my colleagues were not only being investigated by their universities, but they were being called to the criminal court,” she said. “In a country where war is not that unusual, where state violence is not that unusual, a call for peace is annoying for the authorities. So they attacked.”
Just with a click, I was turned into a field of research myself. It was what we had been talking about in the abstract turned into practice.
The crackdown took her by surprise. “At first it was just pure fear,” she said. “Fear of being arrested, fear of being dismissed, but mostly the unease of not being able to foresee what was going to happen. This lasted for about a month, or a month and a half, and then I got tired of it. It does not help, it paralyzes you, it consumes you. So I started to get involved in solidarity networks in Turkey. And I started to write.”
By that time, she was on sabbatical at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, working on a project about feminist academics in the United States. When her time at UMass was over, she thought about returning home, but opted to take a visiting professor position at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where she taught until the end of last year.
She is not banned from traveling to Turkey – in fact, she was there in May to help care for a family member. She found the political situation dire, but she was heartened by signs of what she calls “the micropolitics of hope” – the fact that academics, political dissenters and other marginalized people have found ways to stay active despite the limitations placed on them.
But the uncertainty makes it hard for her to focus on her work there. “I was not able to write in my country,” she said. “It was not like someone stopped me from writing, but I couldn’t start.”
This winter, she came to Cornell as a visiting scholar with CIES, with support from the Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund.
At Cornell, she said, the words have flowed.
“It has been amazing,” Coşar said. “I have been able to do the things that I wasn’t able to do for the last two and a half years. I completed manuscripts, I applied for research funds, I submitted a book proposal. The academic environment is so hospitable here. My colleagues are friendly and supportive and understanding. I cannot help but write, and the subjects that I am studying are right at the center of what is happening.”
That is exactly what CIES director Esra Akcan had hoped for. “Scholars with the courage to speak out against repressive regimes are increasingly under threat worldwide,” she said. “Cornell is well-positioned to provide a supportive community for these academics, and the space to continue their research, teaching and activism.”
Since 2004, the university has welcomed four researchers under the Scholar Rescue Fund program. Last year, CIES hosted Azat Gündoğan, a sociologist from Turkey who had also signed the so-called peace declaration.
Under Erdoğan, Turkey has become an international battleground for academic rights. Since 2016, an estimated 6,000 researchers, teachers and others have lost their jobs at Turkish universities because of their political views. Having experienced the crackdown firsthand, Coşar has been struck not just by the numbers, but by the emotional effects.
“You cannot be sure of yourself, how democratic you are, how egalitarian you are, until you are pushed into a situation where your principles are tested,” she said.
Coşar sometimes questions her own response. “After a year or so in North America, I still feel that divide in myself, asking whether I would rather be in my country, directly involved in the solidarity networks, rather than being abroad. But for now the balance is tipping toward staying away. Perhaps I’m being selfish.”
After a pause, she adds, “I’m always critical of myself, but my conscience is okay.”
It helps that she and her dog have found a place where they feel at home. “I love Ithaca,” she said with a smile. “There’s a sense of community here. And Cornell is a great place for academic production.”
Jonathan Miller is associate director for communications at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University. This article was first published by the Cornell Chronicle.
Finding Asylum: Ithaca City of Asylum’s first short-term writer in residence
Short-term writer-in-residence for Ithaca City of Asylum Raad Rahman will lead lectures and public readings through May 9. She will present a seminar at Cornell’s South Asia Program on Monday, April 23 at 12:15 p.m. in G08 Uris Hall. During her residency she will work on a novel.
Read more about her work and mission in The Ithaca Times.
Raad Rahman, spring 2018 visiting writer with Ithaca City of Asylum
Dissident Bangladeshi writer visits Ithaca April 8-May 9
Raad Rahman, a journalist, novelist, essayist and human rights advocate from Bangladesh, will be in Ithaca from April 8 to May 9 as a writer-in-residence with Ithaca City of Asylum (ICOA). She will meet with Cornell students and faculty and present a seminar at the South Asia Program on April 23 at 12:15 p.m. in G08 Uris Hall.
Raad Rahman, spring 2018 visiting writer with Ithaca City of Asylum
Rahman has worked for media and human rights organizations in the United Kingdom, India, Jamaica, Hungary and the United States. She says she focuses her fiction and journalism on bringing repressed stories into the open. She has received death threats in Bangladesh for her writing on LGBT issues; fellow journalists there have been murdered.
“The situation in Bangladesh is dire for writers,” she said. “Muslims like me are under attack. I want to continue to tell our stories at a time when diverse voices regarding Islam and Muslim females are few and far between in mainstream media.”
Rahman’s writing has been published by The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Guardian, Guernica, VICE, The Rumpus, Roads and Kingdoms and UNICEF. Guernica nominated one of her essays for the 2017 Pushcart Prize.
She holds a bachelor’s degree from Bard College and a master’s degree from Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. She has received fellowships and grants from the Rory Peck Trust, the International Women’s Media Foundation, PEN America, Open Society Foundation, Bard College and Harvard’s Kennedy School and completed residencies with the OMI International Arts Center, Hedgebrook and Hypatia-in-the-Woods.
Ithaca City of Asylum, a not-for-profit project of the Center for Transformative Action, provides refuge in Ithaca for dissident writers and promotes freedom of expression. Founded in 2001, ICOA is one of two North American members of the International Cities of Refuge Network, a worldwide consortium. The project has hosted six writers for two-year residencies in Ithaca. Rahman is ICOA’s first short-term writer-in-residence.
Rahman will give two public readings. On April 11, she will be the featured writer at the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival’s literary showcase. Her reading from her work, “When the Politics Becomes Personal: Using Fiction and Nonfiction to Address Political Violations,” is at 6 p.m. at Ithaca College’s Handwerker Gallery. On May 6, she will read from her fiction as part of Ithaca’s Spring Writes Festival. Her presentation, “Love, Justice and Extremism in Bangladesh,” is at 2 p.m. at Buffalo Street Books, Ithaca.
Rahman plans to use her residency to work on her current project, a novel that tells the story of two teenagers pitted against each other after a high-profile terrorist attack, and to finish a book of essays.
The residency is made possible in part with funds from Cornell’s Office of the Vice Provost for International Affairs. ICOA is also a community partner of the Kitchen Theatre Company, Ithaca College and the Tompkins County Public Library.
New film on Ithaca City of Asylum
This short documentary was produced by Maureen Wietecha, ICOA’s spring 2017 intern. It provides an overview of ICOA work and features interviews with Raza Rumi, our current writer in residence, as well as three of our board members, Barbara Adams, David Guaspari, and Kate Klein.
Ithaca City of Asylum to Read at Spring Writes Festival
The public is cordially invited to a reading by five writers who are active on the board of Ithaca City of Asylum. The authors will give short readings from their own poetry and prose as part of the Spring Writes Literary Festival.
“Ithaca City of Asylum is a literary-minded group,” said board member Edward Hower. “The organization supports writers from abroad, many board members themselves are published writers, and we have fun.”
The lineup:
Katherine Anderson
Brenna Fitzgerald
David Guaspari
Edward Hower
Gail Lillian Holst-Warhaft
The event will take place on Sunday, May 7, from 3:30 to 4:30 p.m., at Buffalo Street Books.
First Ithaca-bound refugees to arrive later this month
This article was originally published on Ithaca.com.
Catholic Charities of Tompkins/Tioga has announced the first family to come to Tompkins County through the agency’s refugee resettlement program is scheduled to arrive later this month.
“After months of preparation, Catholic Charities of Tompkins/Tioga (CCTT) was approved by the U.S. State Department last October as a Refugee Reception and Placement Site,” said Renee Spear, executive director of the agency. “We have recently gotten word through that we will soon be receiving a family from Afghanistan as the first people to be welcomed through our new program.”
This family is entering the U.S. under the Special Immigrant Visa program, intended for people who were employed by or on behalf of the United States government in Afghanistan or Iraq. The rigorous process of obtaining SIV status is administered by the U.S. State Department, which issues these visas in very limited numbers, according to a news release.
“This is a different immigration status than people who have been vetted and designated as refugees by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees,” said Sue Chaffee, director of Catholic Charities’ Immigrant Services Program. “However, once these SIV holders enter the U.S., they are welcomed and oriented to life in this country through refugee resettlement agencies like ours.”
In order to respect the privacy of this family and in recognition of the upheaval and trauma they have experienced, Chaffee said, the family’s name, address or further details about them will be made available to the public. However the organization has been working closely with the Ithaca School District, local physicians’ offices, community organization Ithaca Welcomes Refugees and others to help ensure this family will have a “warm welcome and a smooth transition to our community.”
As for the future of the rest of the 50 refugees the charity has pledged to take in, the agency remains uncertain: A presidential executive order signed in late January suspended refugee resettlement in the U.S. Last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a ruling from a lower federal judge blocking parts of the executive order, which allowed refugees who had advanced booking notices into the country again. Because of the uncertainty of how further court cases will be decided or new executive orders will be worded, Catholic Charities staff, according to the release, is unable to predict the timing of any future resettlement of refugees.
Catholic Charities of Tompkins/Tioga has announced the first family to come to Tompkins County through the agency’s refugee resettlement program is scheduled to arrive later this month.
“After months of preparation, Catholic Charities of Tompkins/Tioga (CCTT) was approved by the U.S. State Department last October as a Refugee Reception and Placement Site,” said Renee Spear, executive director of the agency. “We have recently gotten word through that we will soon be receiving a family from Afghanistan as the first people to be welcomed through our new program.”
This family is entering the U.S. under the Special Immigrant Visa program, intended for people who were employed by or on behalf of the United States government in Afghanistan or Iraq. The rigorous process of obtaining SIV status is administered by the U.S. State Department, which issues these visas in very limited numbers, according to a news release.
“This is a different immigration status than people who have been vetted and designated as refugees by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees,” said Sue Chaffee, director of Catholic Charities’ Immigrant Services Program. “However, once these SIV holders enter the U.S., they are welcomed and oriented to life in this country through refugee resettlement agencies like ours.”
In order to respect the privacy of this family and in recognition of the upheaval and trauma they have experienced, Chaffee said, the family’s name, address or further details about them will be made available to the public. However the organization has been working closely with the Ithaca School District, local physicians’ offices, community organization Ithaca Welcomes Refugees and others to help ensure this family will have a “warm welcome and a smooth transition to our community.”
CUMEME Benefit Concert
Thank you to everyone who attended the Cornell Middle Eastern Music Ensemble Concert at Cinemapolis on Thursday, February 9th.
This event had an outstanding turnout. We sold 99 tickets, and as the theater only sat 87 people, we had to bring in extra chairs! Thanks to this large audience, we raised about $1200 to go towards future ICOA projects. CUMEME played a wonderful selection of songs from the Middle East that delighted the crowd. In addition to the music, the audience enjoyed a variety of Middle Eastern sweets like baklava and Turkish delight.
If you have any photos or video from the event that you would like to share with us, please send them to us on Twitter (@ICOAnews) or share them to our Facebook page.
Ithaca Times: Ithaca City of Asylum Benefit Concert
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN THE WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1 EDITION OF THE ITHACA TIMES.
WRITTEN BY LISA LAFFEND.
Freedom of speech is a crucial part of the United States’ foundation. As citizens, we use and abuse it daily.
“Here in America, we sort of take it for granted,” says Joseph Prusch, the director of the Cornell University Middle Eastern Music Ensemble, CUMEME. “Serbia doesn’t believe in free speech and so many people have died because of that.”
In Turkey, learning about one’s own culture and history, outside of what’s taught in the classroom, can be dangerous. A professor at Istanbul University and Ithaca College’s own former visiting scholar, Vedat Demir along with many others were arrested in late July 2016 for being academics. Several other countries have similar issues and finding refuge is challenging.
For some, there’s Ithaca City of Asylum, ICOA.
“Ithaca City of Asylum brings writers whose work has placed them in danger to Ithaca,” says Gail Holst-Warhaft, an ICOA board member and adjunct professor in the department of Classics, Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. “Ithaca and Pittsburgh are the only cities in America that offer this opportunity.” The visiting author stays with ICOA for two years and teaches at Ithaca College or Cornell University.
The current ICOA resident is Raza Rumi Ahmad, a policy analyst, journalist and author from Pakistan. He’s currently a scholar in residence at Ithaca College’s School of Humanities and Science, but, back home, his work brought him under government surveillance and made him the target of an assassination attempt.
Taking in refugees is a costly undertaking, so CUMEME will be performing a benefit concert for ICOA at Cinemapolis on February 9 at 7 p.m., with a cover charge of $7.50 for students and $15 for the general public. The proceeds from this concert will go towards airfare, legal expenses and the cost of living for ICOA writers and their family.
ICOA and CUMEME have collaborated before, since the forum for cross-cultural discussion CUMEME prides itself in complements ICOA’s mission. Despite being a Cornell University student organization, membership is open to the Ithaca community. Consisting of new and experienced performers, the ensemble performs both popular and classical music from the Middle East, or Near East, and from areas influenced by these cultures. They’ve been a resource for individuals to learn more about their own and their peers’ cultures as well as providing a sanctuary for Middle Eastern students.
“I come from Kashmir,” says Ahmad Rafiqi, a graduate student in the math department at Cornell University and percussionist in CUMEME, “and the music we play is very similar. I was drawn to the familiar melodies and just wanted to follow the group; I was amazed they would let me join without being able to play an instrument.”
“What I’ve enjoyed the most is performing songs from my childhood,” says Doga Tekin, an interdisciplinary studies major at Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences as well as a singer and kanun player in CUMEME. “It’s nostalgic for me. Each performance is an opportunity to share my love for my home with the audience and others in the ensemble.”
Heavy research goes into each set ensuring the fit of each song for the performance and their reflection of current events.
“My intention with every program is to show the common thread of humanity that runs through all cultures and people,” says Prusch, “and to glorify the shared history of nobodies with the hope of preventing the ongoing dehumanization of people, especially refugees, but also women and minorities, regardless of nation.”
This set will consist of songs from Lebanon, Greece, Jordan, Algeria, and Turkey. Songs about foreign police brutality – like Marcel Khalife’s “Asfur” addresses issues in Palestine and the Algerian-inspired “Ya Rayah” about a man tortured under a dictatorship – are mixed with those about a young fisherman’s sad voyage (the Greek sea chanty “I Trata Mas Kourelou”), blooming flowers or feminine sexuality (the Turkish songs “Ayva Çiçek Açmi5” and “Bala Çiçek Acar Bahar Gelende”), and the story of a young woman who gains the attention of a shepherd at a water spring (“Ya Ayn Mawlayitan” by Lebanese singer Samira Tawfik). All of which the ensemble is excited to share.
“‘Yedikule’ and ‘Çadırımın Üstüne’ are my favorites,” says Tekin. “‘Yedikule’ has nice instrumentation and is fun to play and ‘Çadırımın Üstüne’ is a classic Turkish song with so much life and character to it.”
“I enjoy ‘I Trata Mas Kourelou,’” says Alicia Freedman, a longtime member of CUMEME as both a dancer and percussionist, “because of the simple chorus that makes me want to spin like the wind. ‘Ya Ayn Mawlayitan’ has an unusual rhythm with no downbeat, and that’s why I like to dance to that as well. It’s like you’re holding your breath, landing on each measure a beat later with more weight.”
“‘Ayva Cicek Acmis’ is definitely my favorite,” says Mathew Roth, a pianist and composer who plays mandolin, among other things, for CUMEME. “It’s fun to play, catchy, and outlines what I like so much about this group. It’s a song you can really lose yourself in.”
CUMEME will be playing these and more in hopes of helping make a change.
“It’s a matter of educating and reaching out across our political spectrum,” says Prusch. “Music is one of the key ways of doing that.”
Bring Pakistan’s Missing Bloggers Home
Our resident writer, Raza Rumi, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times on January 20, 2017. Read it below or on the New York Times website
Since Jan. 4, at least five bloggers and activists have disappeared in Pakistan. Perhaps the best known is Salman Haider, a poet and academic who has been a vocal opponent of religious extremism and the Pakistani authorities’ abuse of opposition activists. The others who have vanished had the courage to critique organized religion, the influence of clerics in Pakistan and the country’s powerful military on social media.
Throughout Pakistan’s history, dissent and free speech have been muzzled by a state that inherited a repressive legal framework from the British colonizers who ruled the Indian subcontinent until 1947. Journalists, poets, intellectuals and many politicians who questioned the state were labeled traitors, sometimes jailed or exiled, and on occasion killed. Almost every Pakistani government — military or civilian — has tried to control and manipulate the news media.
That kind of control has become more difficult as print and electronic media have expanded in the past decade and a half. Since the deregulation of electronic media in 2002, Pakistan has gone from three to 89 television channels. The state’s monopoly of the airwaves is over. Noisy talk shows regularly challenge the elected governments and their policies. But when it comes to the military, journalists and commentators are cautious, often indulging in self-censorship. Laws governing freedom of speech and the news media are vague, and their enforcement is arbitrary; critics are often accused of endangering national security.
The rise of social media and blogs has further expanded the space for dissent. Pakistanis can say on Facebook things they still could not get away with on television or in print. The missing activists, for example, were allegedly affiliated with satirical Facebook pages that ridiculed the hypocrisy of religious clerics and the flawed state policies of using jihad to further foreign policy goals.
Last year, the Parliament passed a draconian cybercrimes law curtailing digital freedoms. This law grants the government overarching powers to control and block information that state officials find offensive, examine and retain users’ data, and impose harsh penalties for a variety of offenses. The law builds on the narrow definition of freedom of speech that the Constitution guarantees in principle but with a number of exceptions that include “glory of Islam,” “the integrity, security or defense of Pakistan” and “public order, decency or morality,” among others. Such ambiguous terms are easily invoked to suppress dissent.
After the enactment of the cybercrime law, Pakistan’s intelligence agencies reportedly asked for legal cover to take pre-emptive “action” against people they believed were breaching national security. This demand was accepted. It is unclear whether the five bloggers and social media activists have disappeared under this arrangement. In fact, there is no information from any official source. But there is good reason to be worried.
In recent years, hundreds of suspected insurgents from the southwestern province of Baluchistan and religious militants from other parts of the country have allegedly been picked up by security agencies, never to be heard from again. A government commission is handling at least 1,129 cases of “missing” persons.
Even if the five activists reappear, they will face the wrath of zealots who want instant justice for blasphemers. In recent days, right-wing social media users and pundits have been smearing the missing men as blasphemers. In addition, they have been accused in absentia by conservative sections of the Pakistani media and right-wing trolls as pawns of foreign powers (read India, the eternal enemy) who are waging an information war against Pakistan.
The exact relationship between these right-wing loudmouths and the security services remains, as ever in Pakistan, murky. But these activists’ lives are most likely in danger. In 2011, a police guard killed Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab Province, because he had publicly defended a Christian woman sentenced to death under the blasphemy law, a law he said needed to be reformed.
By cracking down on people opining on social media, Pakistan joins Turkey, Bangladesh, China and other countries where journalists and activists are hounded by the state and by extremists. Pakistan’s elites, both civilian and military, frequently complain that their country has an image problem. Such disappearances certainly don’t help. Moreover, in an interconnected world, such moves are counterproductive. The elected government of Pakistan must be held accountable for such brazen curtailment of rights. The Parliament needs to review the scope of internet freedoms as well as reconsider the nebulous guarantee of free speech provided by the Constitution.
The international community should help, too. It can remind the Pakistani government of its obligations under the United Nations Convention against Torture and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to put an end to enforced disappearances. In its 2015 compliance report on the civil rights covenant, the government stated that it was “firmly committed to the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” It is time to move beyond lip service. Upholding freedom of speech will only bolster Pakistan’s fragile democracy.
But most of all, these missing men should be returned home safely as soon as possible.
Raza Rumi, who teaches at Ithaca College and the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs, is a consulting editor for The Friday Times, a weekly in Pakistan, and the author of “The Fractious Path: Pakistan’s Democratic Transition.”
Middle Eastern Music Benefit Concert for ICOA
As a benefit for Ithaca City of Asylum, Cornell’s Middle Eastern Music Ensemble will perform a concert of music from Turkey, Greece, Egypt, and Iran at Cinemapolis on Thursday, February 9th at 7pm. Middle Eastern sweets will be served.
Tickets are $15.00. $7.50 for students. Tickets available at the door (price includes a pastry).
Your support of ICOA at this time is particularly valued as our prospective next writer is from one of the 7 countries that Trump has imposed a ban upon.
ICOA is not-for-profit project of the Center for Transformative Action. It provides refuge in Ithaca for dissident writers and promotes freedom of expression. Founded in 2001, ICOA is a member—one of only two in North America —of the International Cities of Refuge Network, a worldwide consortium of cities of asylum.
Cornell University’s Middle Eastern Music Ensemble was established in 2002 and in its various iterations, the group has been delighting audiences on and off the campus ever since. Under its current director, Joseph Prusch, students, faculty, and community members interested in the rich variety of music from the region can come join to study and perform.
Find more information on CUMEME on their website or Facebook page
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