Following the unsuccessful coup in Turkey earlier this year, the regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has cracked down on thousands of people and institutions with alleged connections to the Gulenist movement. One such institution is the International Burch University in Sarajevo, established in 2008 by a Bosnian organization called Bosna Sema. The Turkish government accuses the organization of connections to Gulen and to “terrorism.”
Students and staff say that the private university is now under surviellance, and some within the BiH government may be pressuring people not to attend the school. Prominent members of the SDA, which considers itself an ally of Turkey and Erdogan, have reportedly called for the school’s closure.
“We don’t need these schools, we have our own system,” Salmir Kaplan, a SDA member of the Parliament of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of Bosnia’s two entities, told Turkish news agency Anadolu, also in July.
In early November, Bosnian Foreign Minister Igor Crnadak was quoted in the Turkish media as saying that the Bosnian authorities were monitoring the institutions and warning parents not to send their children to them.
