Culture as business

Karabük is a provincial town in the western Black Sea region, with around 132 thousand inhabitants, unknown to most, but hit the national news after the creation of an international university, which transformed reality local. In just a few years, the number of foreign students has reached 11,890 units (a quarter of the 47 thousand total students), of which around 5 thousand are of African origin, mainly coming from Tanzania, Zanzibar, Chad, Sudan, Senegal and Gabon.

The absolute protagonist of this turning point is Refik Polat, appointed rector of the university by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself, on May 24, 2019, in an era of purges in the academic senates throughout the country, with the introduction of officials and bureaucrats loyal to power. Rector Polat immediately took action to transform the institution entrusted to him into a for-profit enterprise, rather than into a quality training centre, complaining about the impossibility of relying on state funding. The “foreign student market” in Türkiye is actually nothing new in recent years. In almost 25 years of power, Erdoğan has exponentially developed the presence of Turkish businesses and investments on the African and Asian markets. With the awarding of thousands of university scholarships, to young intellectual elites from various countries, especially from the continents mentioned above, he tried to create Turkish-speaking bridgeheads trained according to Turkish standards, for massive investments of the economic. Meritocracy, however, does not seem to have been the main requirement that guided Rector Polat's recruitment policies. Quite a few independent journalistic investigations have proven that foreign students in Karabük have been recruited with irregular methods, without passing the entrance exam (YÖS) and through a nebula of intermediation companies that generate illegal profits, driving up individual tuition fees. registration, from a few hundred dollars officially expected up to 20 thousand dollars. The exploitation and ghettoization of these foreign students has transformed entire neighborhoods of Karabük into off-limit zones, where exploitation aimed at prostitution and criminal trafficking, particularly linked to the drug market, seem to be growing. Strangled by insurmountable debt, many of these young students find themselves blackmailed and threatened. The tragedy of Dina, a young seventeen-year-old from Gabon who was found dead after having suffered sexual violence just a year ago, has opened Pandora's box, fueling alarms, but also dangerous forms of xenophobia, with an accompanying literature of often unfounded accusations.< br/>

Among these, the one relating to an alleged increase in HIV infections in the Turkish student population, following sexual relations with black students, is a very recent one. In February, the academic authorities took action by making a health report mandatory prior to university enrollment for all foreign students. Secondly, there would have been a (rather belated) squeeze on the aforementioned brokerage firms. In the meantime, in the flurry of bombshell news that was later denied, the Provincial Health Directorate denied the out-of-control increase in HIV and HPV infectious diseases, which had seriously embarrassed the foreign university population, forced to desert lessons for fear of violent reactions. . For their part, quite a few Turkish student groups would have publicly dissociated themselves from this hunt for the infector, underlining the importance of the internationality of Karabük's university population, a source of "human and cultural enrichment". Conditionals are a must, given that the latest news reported comes from pro-government media outlets. New developments are eagerly awaited.


Claudio Monge
NP April 2024