Purge-victim teacher passes away following heart attack

Kazim Ünlü, a former teacher who was removed from his job in the government’s post-coup purge of state institutions and an executive at Turkey’s main educators’ union, Egitim Sen has passed away following a heart attack.

According to Evrensel daily newspaper on Thursday, Ünlü died of a heart attack at his father’s place in Elazig.

Ünlü was the secretary of the Egitim Sen’s local office in Tekirdag province.

“It is the AKP government who killed the teacher, Kazim. Even though the reason for his death was detected as a heart attack, the role of what dragged him into the stress should not be underestimated. It should be taken into account as well. They took away his job, his living. His children go to school and he was struggling to look after them,” his colleague Kenan Korkmaz told Evrensel.

Prior to his death, Ünlü appeared in several protests demanding reinstatement to his job.

Turkey survived a failed military coup on July 15, 2016, after which nearly 150,000 people have lost their jobs in the face of the government’s cruel purge of state institutions. The government crackdown targeted almost all opposition circles, from Gulen movement members to leftists, from Kurdish origins to liberals, and from Alevis to many other dissidents of the AKP policies.