Speaking at the tenth anniversary programme of the Türkiye Maarif Vakfı at the Beştepe Millet Kütüphanesi in Ankara on Wednesday, President Erdoğan said: “We secured the complete or partial closure of schools linked to FETÖ in more than 50 countries.”

The verb is the significant part. He did not say the schools closed, or that host states closed them. He said Türkiye brought it about.

Our report Turkish Maarif Foundation and the Global Attack on Gülen Schools, published in July, documents what that sentence covers. According to the report, across 29 countries, at least 164 educational institutions were closed, confiscated or transferred, affecting approximately 7,952 teachers and administrative staff. Of those institutions, 131 were handed to the Maarif Foundation and 31 were closed or seized without transfer.

The Foundation was established by Law No. 6721, adopted on 17 June 2016 and published in the Official Gazette on 28 June. The coup attempt it is now credited with answering took place 28 days after the law was adopted, and 17 days after it was published.

It is a foundation in form. Its Board of Trustees has twelve members, with permanent members appointed through executive channels and ex officio representation from the ministries of National Education, Foreign Affairs and Treasury and Finance and from the Council of Higher Education. Alongside the Ministry of National Education, it is the only body authorised to open educational institutions abroad on behalf of the Republic of Türkiye.

Türkiye’s own Constitutional Court described the arrangement plainly. Dismissing a challenge brought by 133 opposition members of parliament in 2018, it acknowledged that the legislature had given the Foundation public privileges not ordinarily available to private foundations, including the power to acquire institutions abroad and to create companies, and that its resources may be supplemented by transfers from the state budget and by allocations of public assets through executive decision.

Those transfers have grown. Cumulative allocations reached approximately 27.7 billion lira over eight years, rising from hundreds of millions in the early years to 1.8 billion in 2022, 2.9 billion in 2023, 5.7 billion in 2024, 6.7 billion in 2025 and 7.8 billion in 2026. The Foundation is not subject to the Court of Accounts auditing that applies to public administrations.

The people who carried out the transfers moved between the Foundation and the diplomatic service. Its founding president, Birol Akgün, later became Türkiye’s Ambassador to Azerbaijan. Hasan Yavuz signed the handover agreements in Niger in December 2016, the Republic of Congo in June 2017 and Mali in August 2017, and was introduced throughout as an ambassador.

In 2022 Akgün set out the objective in the Foundation’s own bulletin: the Foundation had made official contact with 104 countries, and “particularly in developing countries, three out of four schools affiliated with FETÖ have actually been either neutralised or transferred completely”. He said the Foundation had taken over 234 such schools in twenty countries.

What the handovers looked like on the ground is set out country by country in the report. Licences were revoked without adversarial proceedings. Courts ruled and were not obeyed, in Niger and in Jordan. Cases could not be brought or were not admitted, in Afghanistan and in Liberia. Cases have remained pending for years without resolution, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Senegal. Property was reportedly damaged during enforcement in Mali. Land was expropriated through state acquisition in Zambia. Staff were dismissed without individual assessment, on the basis of which institution employed them, and in a number of countries were deported or barred from returning.

Sixteen of the twenty-nine states are parties to the Rome Statute. Within those sixteen, 85 institutions and 3,359 people are affected. The report concludes that there is a reasonable basis to examine whether the documented acts, taken cumulatively, meet the elements of persecution as a crime against humanity under Article 7(1) of the Statute, on the grounds of severe deprivation of fundamental rights, targeting on political grounds and systematic implementation across multiple jurisdictions. The assessment is preliminary and the report says so.

Inside Türkiye the comparable figures are 3,492 institutions closed, including some 1,350 schools, and the work permits of 19,962 education personnel cancelled as of September 2018.

Erdoğan told the anniversary audience that the Foundation now operates in 66 countries. Addressing those who ran the schools it replaced, he said they would pay for their treachery in this world and before the highest court, and that tomorrow they would be in a far more pitiful, far more wretched state.

“FETÖ” is the Turkish authorities’ designation and is used here as quotation only. This organisation does not adopt it.

A head of state has now said in public that his government secured the closure of schools in more than fifty other countries. The record of how that was done exists, and it is a record of licences withdrawn, judgments ignored, and seven thousand nine hundred people dismissed for the name on the building where they taught.