Atilla Yayla

Yayla supported The Kurdish Initiative project launched by the AKP government in 2009 to improve the human rights of Kurdish citizens of Turkey, and praised the advisory group, Akil İnsanlar Heyeti (The Wise People Commission), organized by the government to contribute to the solution process. As part of the support, the Association for Liberal Thinking sent, through the Ministry of Justice, a package of books with liberal themes to the leader of the militant Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, who was arrested in 1999 by the Turkish National Intelligence Agency (MIT) and has been in prison since then on İmralı island in the Sea of Marmara.

In 2008 Yayla was one of the signees of the Özür Diliyorum (I Apologize) campaign that caused an enormous reaction in Turkey by the government and the public. The participants implicitly claimed that the Ottoman Empire was responsible for the Armenian Genocide, which Yayla had denied in the 1980s as "an alleged genocide that never happened". The declaration read as "My conscience does not accept the insensitivity showed to and the denial of the Great Catastrophe that the Ottoman Armenians were subjected to in 1915. I reject this injustice and for my share, I empathize with the feelings and pain of my Armenian brothers and sisters. I apologize to them."

In 2006, Yayla was charged with insulting the legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk by calling him "that man" in a speech where he argued that the one-party period of Republic of Turkey was less democratic than the preceding period of constitutional monarchy under Ottoman empire and the early and short-lived multi-party period of the Republic of Turkey, and also strongly criticized the cult of personality that has grown up around Atatürk since. Some newspapers, notably Yeni Asır proclaimed him a traitor. In a court case, he was convicted and received a suspended 15-month jail sentence. Yayla was also dismissed temporarily from his academic post.

He was a visiting professor at the University of Buckingham. He was the winner of the Anthony Fisher Prize in 2000 for his book "Islam, Civil Society and Market Economy". Yayla was awarded the Person of the Year Award by the Stockholm Network in 2007.

In 1992 Yayla founded the Association for Liberal Thinking (ALT) with his colleagues and served as its chairperson between 1997 and 2008. He remains an active member of ALT.

As an undergraduate, he studied economics at Ankara University, going on to earn a master's degree in public administration and a Ph.D in political science (1986).

Yayla also wrote articles in the 1980s for the right-wing magazine Yeni Forum, notorious for the donations it received from the U.S. organization the National Endowment for Democracy, and later in the 2000s and 2010s for newspapers Zaman, the main publishing organ of the Gülen Movement held responsible by the Turkish government for 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt, and the pro-government Islamist Yeni Şafak. He currently writes for the pro-government liberal newspaper Yeni Yüzyıl.

In the 1970s he was involved in Yeniden Milli Mücadele Hareketi (The War of Independence Anew Movement), an anti-communist, anti-zionist and anti-imperialist reactionary movement founded by Islamist students. In the mid-1980s, around 1984-85 according to his statement, he embraced liberal views. However, Yayla went on during the 1980s to support the military junta in Turkey, writing "Thanks to the 12 September 1980 operation, Turkey has been freed from the blaze of terrorism, which had almost turned into a civil war, and found peace." He praised the army, writing "... the fact that the Turkish army has established an unprecedented tradition in terms of commitment to democracy is also the guarantee of our democracy's survival", and praised the leader of the military junta, the Chief of the General Staff, Kenan Evren, as "... one of the significant sources of hope for the survival of our democracy." Again, in 2007, Yayla praised Evren for his views on a possible transition to a federal system in Turkey, saying: "No one dares [to express these views] since freedom of speech is not developed enough [in Turkey]. Kenan Evren is in the best position to express these views. He is opening a new era in our thought life, it is a pleasant development."

Atilla Yayla (Turkish: [atiɫɫa jajɫa] , born (1957-03-03 ) March 3, 1957), is a Turkish political thinker and a proponent of liberal democracy. He is one of the founders of Association for Liberal Thinking in Turkey. He was Professor of Politics, Political Economy and Political Philosophy at Gazi University in Turkey. After his retirement from the public sector in 2009, Yayla became head of the International Relations department at Faculty of Commercial Sciences of Istanbul Commerce University until he was fired in 2015. In 2016 he was fired from his teaching post at Haliç University, after the University administration was charged with corruption and turned over to Istanbul University by The Council of Higher Education (YÖK). Yayla lost the case against Haliç University administration in 2019 and was ordered to pay the court fees.

He was born in 1957 in Kaman, Kırşehir.