Would Turkish Scientists Ponder Homecoming After Ankara’s Call?
As NASA Scientist Serkan Golge languishes in prison, why would others return to Turkey?
In a desperate attempt to stop further bleeding of the country’s depleted human resources after an irrevocable brain drain, Turkey’s president and senior leaders call on Turkish scientists living abroad to return to their homeland. Both President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ruling party representatives, though grudgingly, appreciate the fact that Turkey faces a shortage of capable, able men who would pull back things from breaking apart amid undeniable signs of impotence and lack of coherence across all sectors of the bureaucracy in the post-purge era.
In this respect, the president, in a speech last year, directly called on Turkish scientists abroad to return home to contribute to the scientific and technological production in Turkey. For someone familiar with the recent course of events over the past two years, the call appears to be an oxymoron, a self-contradiction that lays bare the paradoxical world in which Erdogan and his government live. It would be professional suicide for any scientist to go back to Turkey given the fact that many people from the scientific community languish in prison on bogus charges in politically-motivated trials.
