When I heard the news on late Tuesday night, I did not know who to pity more than the other. I knew a few of the victims, but the first one I thought was a soft-spoken, elderly gentleman; Prof İbrahim Kaboğlu, from Marmara University, a top Turkish expert on constitution and law.

His civil courage has remained a contrast with his mild manners: he is one of the flag bearers of those who against all odds defend the value of the rule of law. Tuesday night, this senior scholar from Istanbul was ‘awarded’ by being fired, in a most arbitrary way.

With every new decree, tragedy of the dissident elite of Turkey widens, deepens, as it also exposes the underlying intention of those hold power: to maximize efforts for a ‘negative selection’ – as it happened once upon a time in Germany. Decree after decree, what we observe is the victory of intolerant mediocrity over hard-earned merit, and civil courage.

‘Now we can say that the academia in Turkey is done for’ tweeted Kerem Altıparmak, an academic with Ankara University – who as a law expert pursues a fierce battle on injustices at the European Court of Human Rights – on Tuesday night. ‘This applies to us who – for now – are allowed to stay.’

The new decree by the AKP government is by far the most ‘revealing’ of the Great Purge that has taken place. It declared that 330 academicians from 23 universities were sacked from their jobs from the public sector with immediate effect.

The purge turns Turkish academia into a slaughterhouse; Turkey into an ‘intellectual desert’