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Author Margaret Atwood delivered a message in support of educators Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakça on the 84th day of their hunger strike.
In the message, Atwood said:
“Nuriye Gülmen and Semih Özakça were both terminated from their jobs by emergency decrees following the coup attempt in July 2016.
“Gülmen and Özakça are two of 4,811 academics and 40,000 teachers who were dismissed by emergency decrees. They have now been on hunger strike for over 80 days and were arrested on 22 May 2017 in dawn raids, with police breaking down their doors.
“They are in prison in Ankara. Their lives are now in danger due to their desire for justice. They should be released and their jobs should be reinstated.
“Please support all people advocating freedom of expression and democracy in Turkey.”
Prosecutor demands 20 years in prison for Gülmen and Özakça
An indictment was prepared demanding up to 20 years in prison for Gülmen and Özakça, who are kept in Sincan Prison.
The educators are charged with “being a member of an armed organization”, “opposing to the Law on Meetings and Demonstrations”, and “propagandizing for a terror organization”.
CLICK- Gülmen, Özakça Detained on Hunger Strike Now Arrested
In the prosecution statement, Gülmen and Özakça said that started to stage sit-in in protest of their discharge through statutory decree and they went on their protest with the hunger strike because their request to be reinstated to their jobs was rejected.
Gülmen and Özakça were arrested on the grounds that “they would disturb the functioning of the justice system in case they were not arrested and probationary measures would be insufficient when taken into account prescribed time to be served for the respective crimes" on May 23.
About Margaret Atwood
Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist. She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award several times, winning twice. In 2001, she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. She is also a founder of the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit literary organization that seeks to encourage Canada's writing community. Among innumerable contributions to Canadian literature, she was a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize.
Atwood is also the inventor, and developer, of the LongPen and associated technologies that facilitate the remote robotic writing of documents.[5] She is the Co-Founder and a Director of Syngrafii Inc. (formerly Unotchit Inc.), a company that she started in 2004 to develop, produce and distribute the LongPen technology. She holds various patents related to the LongPen technologies.[7]
While she is best known for her work as a novelist, she has also published fifteen books of poetry. Many of her poems have been inspired by myths and fairy tales, which have been interests of hers from an early age. Atwood has published short stories in Tamarack Review, Alphabet, Harper's, CBC Anthology, Ms., Saturday Night, and many other magazines. She has also published four collections of stories and three collections of unclassifiable short prose works. (AS/TK)
