At a graduation ceremony in June, students of Istanbul’s Bilgi University unfurled a banner targeting the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). It read, “They hate arts and science, but say nothing to rape and theft.”
Why the AKP’s approaches to arts and rape have come to be compared is a long story, going back 22 years, when Melih Gokcek was narrowly elected Ankara's mayor on the ticket of the Islamist Welfare Party. Today, Gokcek belongs to the AKP and is still the capital’s mayor. Following his election in 1994, Gokcek, irritated by “nudity,” launched a war on sculptures in Ankara’s streets and parks, having many of them removed. One particular sculptures led him to utter words that have gone down in Turkish political history: “I spit on this kind of art,” he said of the piece, which depicted two women dancing and had been created by Mehmet Aksoy, a leading Turkish sculptor. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, mayor of Istanbul at the time, said he “fully agreed” with his counterpart in Ankara.
