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How one woman is standing up to Turkey’s purges

A Turkish academic, expelled after the July 15 coup attempt, has kept up a solo protest in downtown Ankara since early November, despite frequent detentions and mistreatment by the police.
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The Human Rights Monument — a sculpture depicting a woman reading the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — is a well-known hallmark in a bustling pedestrian area in the heart of Ankara. Over the past month, a second fixture has appeared on the site: a woman with a banner. Despite 17 detentions, often by heavy-handed police, Nuriye Gulmen — one of hundreds of academics suspended from office after the July 15 attempted coup — keeps returning to the site to demand her job back.

Her solo protest since Nov. 9 has made Gulmen a symbolic figure in Turkey’s state of emergency since the putsch, which has seen a ferocious crackdown on followers of Fethullah Gulen — the accused mastermind of the coup — and other government opponents. At a time when street demonstrations have become rare and are quickly clamped down by police, the young woman has stood out with unbending courage and will.

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