Erdoğan targets students, again: ‘Terrorist types’

* Photo: Fatih Kurt - Ankara / AA

Click to read the article in Turkish

President and Justice and Development Party (AKP) Chair Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spoke at the AKP Group Meeting today (October 6).

CLICK - Erdoğan says students protesting housing prices are 'terrorists like those in Gezi Park'

Talking about the ongoing protests of university students in the face of high housing prices and lack of vacancies at public dormitories amid in-class education, President Erdoğan called the students "terör kılıklılar", which roughly translates as "those in guise of terror" or "terror-like."

Arguing that "Turkey is the country with by far the highest dorm capacity across the world", Erdoğan said that "while Turkey's capacity is over one million, this number is 550 thousand in England."

According to Erdoğan, "the reason behind this year's disorder is that the applications from last year and this year have overlapped."

Noting that the works for the students who have not yet been placed in a dorm are still ongoing, President Erdoğan said, "We took over [Turkey] with 76 universities; we now have 207 universities."

Referring to the protesters further in his speech, Erdoğan stated, "We do not consider these types who do not have respect even for their own professors to be students. They do not keep any of these types at the university in Europe or the United States even for a day."

He briefly added, "Just because they are causing trouble for the government, they lay claim to the disrespectful, loveless, ill intentioned and, so to speak, terrorist types. God willing, we will solve this problem within its own sphere without giving opportunity to the ill intentioned as soon as possible. We cannot leave our universities to the terror-like [students]."

Erdoğan to HDP: Puppet of terrorist organization

President and AKP Chair Erdoğan also talked about the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) in the context of the "October 6-8 incidents" in 2014, over which several HDP politicians are currently standing trial.

Recalling that today is the 7th anniversary of the "October 6-8 incidents", Erdoğan alleged that "the then executives of the HDP made their supporters take to the streets and shed the blood of dozens of people."

He said that "those who set the wild mob into motion are now answering for the blood in their hands in prisons."

Addressing Republican People's Party (CHP) Chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, he argued that "Kılıçdaroğlu backed them instead of bringing them to account". He said, "At every opportunity, we will tell our nation over and over again that this party's policies are neither domestic nor national."

"History will surely call the ones who have put the oldest party of the Parliament, the CHP, under the order of the HDP, a puppet of the terrorist organization, to account," President Erdoğan said further.

Referring to the opposition İYİ Party and its Chair Meral Akşener as well, President Erdoğan argued that "the İYİ Party's efforts to protect its own position are not sustainable any longer." Reminding his audience of Akşener's statement that "she wants to be a candidate for Prime Ministry, not Presidency", Erdoğan said, "The HDP wing has already said that it will not accept her Prime Ministry. Exercising its right to secret partnership in the Nation's Alliance, it has vetoed her [Meral Akşener]."

Arguing that Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu "has turned into a matter of national security", he said, "Turkey does not have a problem about the government, but it has a serious problem about the opposition." (AS/SD)