The preliminary @OSCE report: “Turkey, Constitutional Referendum, 16 April 2017: Statement of Preliminary Findings and Conclusions”

A year after the EU deal with Turkey to stem the flow of migrants into Europe, Hungary is doubling down protection of its border.Syrian refugee family at the Kelebija transit camp, March 23,2017.Krystian Maj/Press Association. All rights reserved. The western gaze needs fresh victims and apparently it sees in me one of those new victims. How do I know this? I read it in the newspaper, in the Wall Street Journal, no less. Here is what the WSJ said about me on August 24, 2016:

In Istanbul, Nil Mutluer grabbed her 3-year-old daughter and raced with a suitcase toward Turkey’s coast. The former sociology-department chair at the city’s Nisantasi University narrowly escaped the nation’s looming dragnet. “Authorities had already begun questioning colleagues at the airports,” said Dr. Mutluer, a Western-leaning liberal who took a ferry to Greece en route to an academic post in Berlin.

A striking beginning for a newspaper story isn’t it? An academic single mother escapes with only one suitcase and her three years old daughter, via Greece to boot! Touching too – exactly the sort of human interest story of victimisation that the western gaze seems to demand from its news outlets.

A couple of months after that story was published, the Turkish correspondent of another major European news outlet, herself a Turkish citizen, contacted me. Having finally discovered what has been happening to Academics for Peace since the beginning of the year, she told me that she had interviewed a number of other academics who had left Turkey and that she would like to include my story in her article as well.