Education Minister Yusuf Tekin, no stranger to controversy, has provoked a backlash after announcing a change to the newly updated national school curriculum that renames the War of Independence.
Speaking at a meeting with the AKP lawmakers, Tekin defended the removal of the phrase 'War of Independence' — also called the 'War of Liberation' — from textbooks, replacing it with 'National Struggle.'
'What are we being liberated from? Before that, there was the great Ottoman Empire,' Tekin said during his presentation to lawmakers behind closed doors, according to Ebru Karatosun from the Hürriyet daily. Tekin, 55, has previously said that co-education is not an obligation, that secularism is used to limit religious freedom, and that religious sects are civil society organizations.
His latest skirmish with secular Kemalism centers on the nation’s founding story. Thus far, children have been taught that the War of Independence began on May 19, 1919, when the nation's founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk landed in Samsun to launch a war of resistance against the allied occupation of Anatolia — at a time when the Ottoman government in Istanbul was negotiating with the occupying powers. The conflict lasted till the Armistice of Mudanya, signed in October 1922, and paved the way for the proclamation of the Republic in 1923.
The CHP’s ousted chair Özgür Özel said the answer to Tekin’s question was clear: 'In the War of Independence we are being saved from occupation, invasion, the division of the country, and the nation becoming a colony of another country.'
Özel also called Tekin an ox, an animal associated with ignorance and insensitivity. 'The country was saved by those who wrapped their children's blankets around ammunition and pulled carts through the night,' Özel said. 'And the ones pulling those carts were oxen, ox!' he yelled.
Labor unions and politicians called the change an ideological assault on the founding values of the Republic. Deniz Ezer, President of the All Teachers' Union (TÖBSEN), called it 'an open ideological intervention against the founding philosophy of the Republic,' adding that 'replacing the phrase War of Independence with National Struggle cannot be seen as an innocent choice.'
CHP lawmaker Suat Özçağdaş said the remarks were the start of a new wave of anti-Republicanism and said that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk saved the nation from both external and internal enemies, calling the founding of the state 'a great epic.'
The left-wing union Eğitim-Sen argued the change is part of a broader socio-political operation 'imposed on society under the name of the 'Century of Turkey Education Model' to radically change the social structure and historical memory.'
Meanwhile, nationalist Zafer Party Chair Ümit Özdağ accused Tekin of lacking patriotism. 'The Minister of Non-National Uneducation hates Turkish consciousness,' Özdağ said, adding that the Ottoman Empire had already collapsed at the start of the War of Independence.
