Powerful positions attract ambitious, even unscrupulous people. We’ve seen both sorts here in the USA, we have vile arguments about who satisfies which criteria. So it’s no surprise, if quite interesting, to hear the same about other countries. President Erdogan of Turkey has recently run into some cruel rumors of disingenuousness when it comes to his educational attainments. Why is this important? Because the Turkish Constitution says so:
The President of the Republic shall be elected by the public from among the members of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey who are over forty years of age and have completed higher education, or from among Turkish citizens who fulfil these requirements and are eligible to be deputies.
AL Monitor‘s Cengiz Çandar reports on the rumors:
The [Higher Electoral Board] chose to respond to the HDP [Peoples’ Democratic Party], perhaps thinking it would silence those who might just be fishing for something to use against the president. The board recently sent the HDP a copy of Erdogan’s supposed diploma, the one he presented when he ran in the August 2014 presidential elections.
The HDP duly published that copy on its Twitter account.
With that, the controversy entered its second and probably more interesting and important phase: There are very strong arguments that the document might be forged, and that the college diploma of the president of Turkey might be a fake one.
There are very valid reasons to suspect the document’s authenticity, as the copy indicates that Erdogan graduated from the Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences of Marmara University in 1981. At the bottom of the diploma, two signatures can be seen clearly: those of the university president and the dean of faculty.
That is very problematic, indeed. First of all, there was no Marmara University in 1981 and no such faculty under that name. Marmara University was founded in Istanbul in 1982. The faculty took that name and became affiliated with the school in 1983. Previously, it had been a college-level institution known as the Academy of Economic and Commercial Sciences.
So, how is it that Erdogan has a signed and dated university diploma, when there was no university or affiliated faculty under that name then?
If you’re interested, here‘s a Turkish site with pictures of the diplomas. Turkish Minute publishes Gökçe Fırat Çulhaoğlu, himself a graduate of the institution in question, who has more details:
Çulhaoğlu emphasized that Erdoğan says he started attending university in 1973, while the university says he was registered in 1974.
“If he studied at the university between 1973 and 1981, as he says, then he studied for 7.5 years. However, maximum education period was 6 years back then. [If what he said was true], Erdoğan should have been expelled from the university in 1979,” he added.
University Faculty Association (ÜNİVDER) members also expressed their opinion on the issue, saying that Erdoğan has two-year license degree, however, he should have had a four-year license degree to become a president.
If this becomes a real issue and Erdogan is forced out, how painful will it be to nullify anything of substance, such as construction work? How does one nullify military operations?
And, yet, there’s a very faintly familiar taste here. Yes, of the fruitloopery foisted on Americans by those who thought President Obama was not a natural-born American. It gives me just a little bit of pause.
