The Erdogan government is apparently “doubling down” on its revisionist and unabashedly irredentist “Blue Homeland” dogma, which initially emerged from fringe nationalist circles in that country and today is on the verge of being inserted into public schools’ curricula.
According to Turkish media reports this week, the country’s education ministry-affiliated Educational Council approved a new studies program dubbed the “Education Model for the Century of Türkiye (Turkey)”. The latter was among the slogans repeated by the ruling AKP party before its national election victory last year, which kept Recep Tayyip Erdogan as president of the reinforced executive branch.
If implemented, primary and secondary pupils in the country will be introduced to the nascent trend of “Turkography”, namely, “Blue Homeland”, “Sea of Islands”, “Sky Homeland” and possibly the futuristic “Space Homeland.”
Another report has the widely criticized and ridiculed Turko-Libyan agreement – which attempted to delimitate EEZs between the two non-bordering states – also finding its way into school textbooks. In order to draw the latter “agreement” Ankara and the provisional government in Tripoli “erased” all Greek islands from their maps and ignored practically every relevant provision of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
The education ministry’s proposed new studies program had debuted on April 26 and was up for public deliberation until May 10, attracting, in fact, more than 67,000 observations and recommendations.
A relevant post by the ministry on its Turkish-language X account late last month read:
Üç tarafı denizlerle çevrili olan ve bir iç denizi bulunan ülkemizin bu alandaki hak ve menfaatlerini koruma ve savunma gerekliliğinin önemine yer verilen müfredatta “Mavi Vatan”ın Adalar Denizi, Karadeniz, Akdeniz ve Marmara Denizi sınırları açısından ülkenin jeopolitiğindeki… pic.twitter.com/Oax4EJdD5P
— Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı (@tcmeb) April 30, 2024