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The Education and Science Laborers Union (Eğitim-Sen) has released a statement about Enes Kara's passing and Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) Muş MP Gülistan Kılıç-Koçyiğit has submitted a Parliamentary inquiry about the dorms of religious communities in Turkey.
Having shared a video where he talked about the oppression that he faced at the dorm of a religious community where he stayed, medical student Enes Kara took his own life. Since then, the religious communities and their dorms have once again come to Turkey's public agenda.
In its statement on Enes Kara's death, the Eğitim-Sen union has said, "The dormitories of religious communities, remembered with harassments, rapes and massacres, have faced us this time with a young person being condemned to despair and detached from life step by step."
'Children with their ties to life weakened...'
The union has underlined that "ensuring the survival of children and young people and offering them a democratic education depend on breaking down this religionist cycle and bringing public, scientific and secular education into life" and addressed the political power holders:
"The life surrounding children and young people is plural, colorful, public; life is open to active encounters with different people and groups. Your desire to raise a religious and vindictive generation does not apply to life. However, the structures far from public and social oversight that you have created claim the lives of children whose ties to life have weakened.
"The fact that the lives of our young people, who must look to the future with confidence and give hope to society with self-confidence and life energy, are ruined must be considered a result of the social engineering that the political power holders have been pursuing for years.
"Because there is a wish to shape our children and young people under the domination of systematically pursued policies on the one hand and that of the parents who give 'consent' to these policies on the other, with their basic rights and freedoms disregarded and their will nullified.
"Trying to understand this problem only through the numbers of public and private dorms will mean addressing this oppressive, prohibitive, authoritarian, sexist and racist siege only in one aspect.
"In fact, the problem can be solved by not only establishing the right to housing in public, free and quality dorms but also by offering a democratic, emancipating, egalitarian and secular housing environment. Such a policy requires the radical change of the current system."
Parliamentary inquiry by the HDP
Moreover, HDP Muş MP Gülistan Kılıç Koçyiğit, by submitting a Parliamentary inquiry, has requested that a Parliamentary Investigation Commission be established to inquire about the problems and losses of life in the dormitories called religious community/ cult dorms and operating in registered or unregistered manner in Turkey.
Kılıç-Koçyiğit has underlined that the capacity of these dormitories opened in every city of Turkey, especially for university students, has neared the capacity of public dorms but it is not known how they are inspected. As the Parliamentary questions regarding the issue are left unanswered, the MP has noted, there is no exact data on the number of such dormitories.
Referring to a series of previous incidents where students were subjected to sexual abuse or lost their lives in fires or explosions at the dorms of various religious communities, sects, cults and foundations, she has noted that "these are just another example of the lack of inspection."
The MP has requested that an investigation commission be founded under the roof of the Parliament "so that the dorms of religious communities/ cults can be turned into public dorms, violations of right to life of the students who have to stay in these dorms can be prevented and the operations of these gradually increasing dorms far from inspection can be inspected."
What happened?
Enes Kara (20), a sophomore at the Fırat University Faculty of Medicine in Turkey's eastern province of Elazığ, talked about his anxiety about the future and the oppression that he faced at the dormitory of a religious community; Kara took his own life afterwards.
The video that he posted nearly a month before the incident was widely shared on social media after his passing. Leaving a suicide note as well, Kara said that though he was not a Muslim, the dorm where he was staying was forcing him to perform daily prayers, attend the classes of the religious community and do daily chores such as cooking and cleaning.
"I have lost my entire joy for life and enthusiasm in the situation that I have found myself in," he said in the video. (AÖ/SD)
