Pakistan’s Islamabad High Court on Thursday dismissed a petition by Pak-Turk international schools administration against the expulsion of its Turkish staff by November 20, saying that the petitioners should approach the interior ministry in this regard.
A day before the arrival of Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan to Pakistan, Pakistani government asked on Tuesday teachers who work at 23 schools affiliated with the Gülen movement in the country to leave Pakistan by Nov. 20.
A total of 108 teachers are working at Glen-affiliated schools in Pakistan, which operate under the name of Pak-Turk International Schools and Colleges. They have been asked to leave the country with their families, numbering 450 people in total.
While Pak-Turk Chairman Alamgir Khan had approached the Islamabad High Court regarding the matter of the expulsion of Turkish staff from the country and not receiving an explanation about the refusal to extend their visas from the Interior Ministry, Justice Amir Farooq asked them to go to the interior ministry.
Pak-Turk Schools staffers in their petition claimed that the applications submitted on June 22 for extension of visas of the staffers were rejected on November 11 without any explanation. They added they were ordered to leave the country within three days on November 14 by the interior ministry.
After Alamgir Khan pleaded with the court to set aside the interior ministry’s orders and grant permission to employees of the network to stay in Pakistan till completion of the ongoing educational session by March 2017, judge Farooq said that giving the staffers a six-day notice to leave the country is unreasonable.
Alamgir Khan also added that the educational session of 11, 000 students associated with 26 branches of Pak-Turk Schools would be affected badly if they complied to the orders that would also affect not only 108 staffers but also their around 400 family members, residing along with them in Pakistan.
The network of Pak-Turk schools and colleges was launched in 1995 under an international NGO registered with the Turkish government.
The chain’s 28 schools and colleges are functioning in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Islamabad, Multan, Karachi, Hyderabad, Khairpur, Jamshoro and Quetta.
Hafiz Arafat, a parent whose children attend a Pak-Turk school in Islamabad, was having difficult time explaining the situation to his kids.
“My children have been studying here for eight years. I find it astonishing that the Turkish government is alleging that the schools are involved in supporting Fethullah Gülen’s ideology,” Arafat told Pakistani newspaper Dawn. “We have never witnessed anything irregular at these schools,” he added.
BBC reported on Thursday that Erdoğan, who is currently in Pakistan, described the decision as “very pleasing.”
In a video that was uploaded to Twitter recently, a Pakistani girl, who attends a Turkish school in Islamabad, bursts into tears after she learned Pakistani government decided to expel her Turkish teachers.
“To every other teacher, to every other person in this planet, to all the Turkish people, I will say one thing. They [teachers] do not deserve this. They do not deserve whatever is coming at them. Even the bad teachers were never bad people. They don’t deserve to go to jail. They had children who deserve education. When you are taking them [the teachers] you are taking away my rights, my education and everything I care about and everything that I love,” said the student in the 62-second video which viewed hundreds of times on Twitter.
