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June 12, 2006

Turkey: The Battle Between Islam And Secularism

The Guardian today discusses the problem existing between Turkey's defenders of its secular constitution, and its Islamist contingent. The Islamists have gained influence since the general election on Sunday, October 30, 2002. On 3 November, the Islamist AKP (Justice & Development Party) won 363 out of 550 seats in the Turkish parliament.

The leader of the party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pictured) was not allowed to take his seat as prime minister, due to his conviction on a charge of inciting religious hatred. This related to his reciting a poem in 1998 which consequently meant he was banned from holding public office.

The AKP party was set up in 2001 from an amalgamation of members of banned former Islamist parties, so his deputy in the party, Abdullah Gul, took office as caretaker prime minister. Gul was a former leader of the Islamist Virtue Party. Regarded as a "moderate", he was appointed Prime Minister on 16 November, 2002.

Lawmakers from the party called for a change in the constitution to allow Erdogan to stand as a member of parliament,. In February 2003, Turkey's electoral commission allowed Erdogan to stand for election to parliament. On 9 March 2003 Erdogan won a seat at a by-election in the southeastern province of Siirt. On 11 March, following Gul's resignation, he was finally declared prime minister.

At his by-election victory speech, Erdogan had declared his commitment to secularism, which has been in place in the country since the days of Kemal Ataturk. As we described in our special report Ataturk created the secular Republic of Turkey on October 9th, 1923. The following year, Ataturk abolished the remnants of the Ottoman Caliphate, the last such body in the world.

Between Ataturk's day and the present, the army and judiciary have been staunch upholders of secularism. When any Islamist parties gained power through elections, the army has mounted coups to depose them.

But that all changed when Erdogan and his band of Islamists came to power. The issue of the hijab came to the forefront. Erdogan's wife Emine is always depicted wearing this item, even though the hijab is banned for anyone in government employ.

On November 10 2005, the Grand Chamber of the European Court in Strasbourg, the last stage of appeal in Europe, ruled that the secular ban on the hijab was legal. Leyla Sahin had complained that she had been banned by Turkey's constitution from wearing the hijab as a medical student at Istanbul University' in 1998.

Erdogan initially refused to comment, but Abdullah Gul claimed: "Turkey cannot move forward with such bans." A few days later, Erdogan launched into a scathing attack on the hijab ban while on a trip to Denmark. He stated: "Hundreds of thousands of girls cannot go to universities because of the ban on wearing Islamic headscarf. This ban is a problem which requires a solution sooner or later."

Following on from the decision by the European Court to support the hijab ban, moves by Islamists to have the constitution altered gained a new momentum supported by, amongst others, the Capital Women's Platform This group had been formed in the 1990s by women, many of them teachers who had lost jobs by refusing to remove their headscarves.

The hijab issue was to have serious consequences. Last month it led to the death of a judge, Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin. On May 17 a lawyer smuggled a Glock automatic pistol into the Council of State in Ankara (the Supreme Court) and shot five judges. Ozbilgin died, but one of his colleagues injured in the attack, Mustafa Birden, had been targeted for abuse by Islamists.

He had earlier this year decided that not only should a teacher not wear her hijab at the school where she was employed, but she was also banned from wearing it on the way to work. His photograph, with the other judges, had appeared in the Islamist newspaper Vakit, and he became a subject for death threats.

The conflict between secular traditions and the desire for the Islamists to revert back to even older traditions has been escalating, long before the shooting of the five judges. The Guardian highlights the case of Veysel Dalci (pictured), a representative of Erdogan's AKP party, who became the focus of a heated controversy regarding AKP's respect for secularism.

On Sunday 23 April, the country commemorated Sovereignty Day, the anniversary of the founding of the first national assembly in 1920. And in the town of Fatsa in the province of Ordu on the Black Sea coast, Veysel Dalci was scheduled to attend a wreath-laying ceremony at a monument to the founder of Turkey's secular republic, Kemal Ataturk. But on the day, Dalci was seen to be chewing gum. A local army garrison commander complained to state prosecutors.

Dalci, a 38-year old pharmacist and father of two, was subsequently arrested, charged with insulting Ataturk's memory. He told CNN Turk TV that he had been chewing gum to cover the odor of garlic from a meal he had consumed the previous night. "After laying a wreath at the monument, I noticed I had gum in my mouth. I am very sorry," he said. He was jailed for two days before being bailed, and now awaits trial. He subsequently denied that he had been chewing gum.

A month before Sovereignty Day, between March 28 and March 31, violent riots took place in the mainly Kurdish town of Diyarbakir, in the southeast of Turkey, a fiercely traditionalist enclave. The riots which were the worst in a decade, happened following the funerals of members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). They were in support of Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed PKK leader, and had caused the deaths of at least 16 civilians, including three small boys. Stones and molotov cocktails were thrown, and a journalist, Ilyas Aktas was shot in the head and fatally wounded.

On April 27, the Turkish Daily News stated that Erdogan had said: "For those who keep their children in the streets or allow them to be used by the [terrorists], their tears tomorrow will be in vain". On May 8 29 youths were put on trial. 36 more minors were charged the following day, bringing the total indicted to 301.

Violence associated with the PKK has cost 37,000 lives since the current insurgency began a decade ago.

It is against this background that Turkey's officials sat down today to talk in Luxembourg to formally open the negotiations for Turkey to join the European Union. As the Guardian states:

The run-up to the momentous day has been anything but smooth. Political violence, assassinations, ethnic conflict, political trials, and human rights violations in recent weeks are generating fear and instability in the country. "There is a fierce and potentially very bloody struggle going on," said Soli Ozel, an Istanbul political scientist.

Diplomats, politicians, and analysts believe the upheaval is being staged by hardline nationalists aimed at destabilising Turkey, discrediting the AKP government of the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and shattering its hopes of integration with Europe.

"The EU reform process has not only been halted," said Cengiz Aktar, director of the EU research centre at Istanbul's Bahcesehir University. "We're currently going through a counter-reformation."

"The main problem right now in Turkey is the power struggle between political Islam and the status quo," said a veteran leftwinger jailed for seven years in the 1970s and still wary of speaking publicly. "Turkey is divided in two and has been ever since Erdogan came to power. On the one side you have the forces of political Islam and on the other those of militant secularism."

Today, the Turkish Daily News reports a speech by Erdogan, in which he says: "Turkey is a member of the global community. We need to be in constant communication with the rest of the world. We can't afford to isolate ourselves. There is no going back on the economic program. There is no tolerance towards corruption."

One result of today's negotiations concerned the vexed problem of Cyprus, which is divided in two, with one part that of Greek nationals, already belonging to the EU, while the north of the island is part of Turkey, following its invasion in 1974. According to EuroNews today the Cypus issue proved a touch nut to cack for diplomats. Turkey does not officially recognise Cyprus, but if it wants to join the EU, it must acknowledge all 24 members of the EU, including Cyprus.

However, today Turkey managed to pass the first of 35 policy chapters which would lead to accession to the EU. It was warned that it must accept Cyprus as an independent entity. Erdogan, however, was bullish on the issue. While his diplomats thrashed out issues in Luxembourg, he was in Croatia, another country hoping to join the EU. There, he said that he did not think 24 EU members would acknowledge any vetos put forward by Cyprus.

Erdogan and his AKP party have been keen exponents of the accession of Turkey into Europe, but some within the country are officially casting doubts about its true motives. Bulent Arinc, a parliamentary speaker of the AKP, has demanded that Turkey's secular constitution be redefined. Next year, there will be votes for Turkey's presidency, which is currently held by Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a pro-secularist. The president, according to a revised version of the constitution, holds the executive power, and there are fears that an AKP president will work towards removing secularism.

By using the EU as a political "safety net", Erdogan is said to be avoiding the threat of a military coup, which has been the fate of previous governments which have veered not nearly so far in the direction of Islamism.

Last week, businessmen told Erdogan that he had spent less time bringing in promised reforms, and more time becoming immersed in religious matters.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at June 12, 2006 8:02 PM

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Posted by: T Laskaris at June 12, 2006 11:46 PM

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