Kudos to the professor asking about Öcalan in final exam

He is an academic from the prestigious Political Sciences Department of Ankara University. His name is Bar?? Ünlü. The conservative Islamist daily newspaper Akit and its newer version, Vahdet, have already targeted him. Not only do these ?newspapers? not like Ünlü, neither does the state.

He reads, researches, publishes, writes books, thinks and makes people think. He questions and makes people question. While this was going on, these papers published reports.

First, it was daily Akit that claimed Ünlü was ?organizing his students, creating chaos.? Then daily Vahdet claimed that Ünlü was making his students engage in ?PKK propaganda.?

Ünlü teaches an elective course at the university, in which the Armenian and Kurdish issues are discussed. In order to understand modern Turkey, these two fault lines must be well understood. Ünlü lectures on the changes that especially the Kurdish political movement underwent in the 19th century.

Naturally, in the final exam that he held about 10 days ago, he asked questions about what he lectured in class. Ünlü asked his students to compare a brochure dated 1978, written by Abdullah Öcalan and titled, ?The Manifesto of the Path of the Kurdistan Revolution,? and an article by Öcalan dated 2012 and titled, ?Democratic Modernity as the Construction of Local System in the Middle East.?

The two were to be compared regarding their stances on concepts and phenomena such as colonialism, the nation state, revolutionary violence and democracy. Consider in this comparison, he asked, the changes in the world and in Turkey in the years since 1978, as well as the transformations undergone by the Kurdish movement and in Kurdish society.

Wow, how can PKK propaganda written by Öcalan be...