Istanbul, Turkey
The President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on Monday called on young people in his country to reject homosexuality, as controversy erupts over his arrest four students accused of insulting Islam with LGBT symbols at Bogazici University in Istanbul.
“Our youth is not a young LGBT man,” Erdogan exclaimed during a virtual meeting with his party’s youth branch. Islamist justice and development (AKP), which has led Turkey since 2002.
“You are a young man with computers and keyboards, you are not LGBT. You are not a young man who spreads the plague; on the contrary, you are a young man who lifts broken or fallen hearts; I trust you,” the president added.
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Comments from Erdogan affects a controversy that erupted last week, when police arrested five students at Bogaziçi University in Istanbul, accusing them of insulting Islam for placing a picture of the Kaba on the ground during an art exhibition in the institution’s gardens.
The controversial work showed the sacred complex of Mecca, with an image of a popular being from Anatolian mythology, half woman and half snake, instead of Kaba and adding a rainbow flag in one corner.
Turkish Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu announced the arrests on Saturday, calling the students “LGBT perverts”, and on the same day, two were remanded in custody on charges of “incitement to hatred”, while two others are arrested. House arrestreports the Diken newspaper.
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Homosexuality is legal in Turkey since 1858, but rejected by much of society, although in Istanbul, Ankara and other cities there is a vibrant gay community and annual pride marches took place until they were banned in 2015.
Politician Devlet Bahçeli, head of the ultra-nationalist MHP party, which is an AKP coalition partner in parliament, denounced in a speech today that Turkish intelligence was not disturbed by the image of the Kaaba and compared the exhibition’s work to the armed Islamist rebellion in Mecca in 1979, which left over 300 dead.