Over a thousand academics for peace who have been targeted intensely for the last one week over the ‘We will not be a party to this crime' declaration, have released another statement in the face of the attacks they have faced for demanding peace against war.

The academics are now facing pressure and legal actions upon an instruction by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who called them "traitors" and “so-called intellectuals”. Dozens of those who undersigned the declaration of peace are now being dismissed from duty or detained by anti-terror police, while their offices are also being raided by police for a detailed search of “evidence of links to terror”.

The four-point statement by academics from across the country strongly criticized the war waged against Kurdish people on the so-called grounds of barricades and trenches. 

The new declaration says;

1. The Erdoğan regime cannot use the current self-created chaos to impose official ideology and suppress different ideas expressed by academics and other sections of Turkish society in a manner exceeding the 12th September military coup period.

2. The barricades and trenches are not the reasons for the current chaos. The reason is the promises made and not kept to Kurds since 1919; the disappointment and disillusionment caused by the overturning of the negotiation table and the constant suppression of Kurds.

3. The Erdoğan regime cannot use these as an excuse to kill the country’s Kurdish citizens, oppress and insult them, drag their corpses behind armoured vehicles and turn their cities into ruins.

4. The PKK cannot slide into blind terror and harm civilians while struggling against the annihilation policy of the state; leave its own people in despair and create an opportunity for the government to implement more oppressive policies.