The women were pushed out early in the morning, before sunrise with nowhere to go. Whether they had money to go anywhere, let alone home, did not matter. It was only a day ago the students were told not to come to classes, stay in their dorms, and not to go home because this was no vacation.
Turkey should never have let those traveling to Saudi Arabia for the Muslim pilgrimage to leave in critical times under corona virus pandemic.
Now the country has 21,000 of them coming back, many infected with the deadly virus.
Turkish government, appeasing religious people, because the government itself is an Islamic rule and gets the most support from the religious population, allowed people to travel for pilgrimage even though it is not required by religion.
Now, the government doesn’t know what to do with them. One pilgrim already tested positive but there is no place to quarantine the incoming those returning from the high-risk Saudi Arabia.
Turkish government solved the problem by raiding the student dormitories at 3:00AM in the morning. The authorities entered a women’s college dormitory in Ankara and told the sleeping students to wake up and immediately leave the facility in few minutes.
The women were pushed out early in the morning, before sunrise with nowhere to go. Whether they had money to go anywhere, let alone home, did not matter. It was only a day ago the students were told not to come to classes, stay in their dorms, and not to go home because this was no vacation.
The religious pilgrims were then bussed to the dormitory for quarantine. They will be spending the rest of the 14 days in the rooms vacated by the women students. However, even this did not go well with the pilgrims as they started to complain the next day saying, “Are they going to make us stay here the entire 14 days? This place is like the horse stables.”
It did not occur to the religious pilgrims who had dished outrageous amounts of money to visit Saudi Arabia for gaining social credibility and become a “pilgrim” that the students endured at least 4 years in those conditions that resembled “horse stables.” As the social media memes joked, not even a single rich pilgrim, after seeing the conditions of the dormitories, volunteered to help make the conditions of the students a little better.
Other student dormitories are being evacuated in Istanbul to house the pilgrim travelers during their quarantine. The students living in two college dorms run by the government with 3,200 and 1,200 capacities have been ordered to go home.
Sendika.org News (M.B.)
