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September 22, 2006

Turkey: A Model Of A Muslim State?

Turkey is officially a secular state, following its formation from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, by the leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. We document the formation of the state, the abolishing of Islamic symbols in the country, as well as Ataurk's troubled relationship with his wife, in our special report, Turkey and the EU. Currently Turkey is trying to join the Euroean Union, and on October 3 last year, it had completed all of the preliminary hurdles on its accession to the EU.

Today, the Treasurer of the Australian government, Peter Costello, is said by the Australian to be poised to praise Turkey as a role model among Islamic nations. Costello will be talking at a Christian lobby conference in Canberra. This meeting is ostensibly to talk about the Christian's worries aout Muslims' desires to establish a Caliphate. The last Caliphate to exist was that of the Ottomans, and it was disbanded by Ataturk in March 1924.

A transcript of Costello's proposed speech states of Ataturk: "He should be held out as a model of leadership for the modern Islamic world."

Groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, who are active in Australia, despite calls for them to be banned, agitate and try to promote the re-establishment of a world-wide Caliphate. Other groups such as Jemaah Islamiyah and Al Qaeda similarly want a Caliphate to established, which makes no recognisance of national boundaries or systems of government.

Costello is tipped to say: "They have a vision of a caliphate stretching across the Middle East toppling what they see as corrupt nation states and enforcing a more 'pure' version of Islam. In our own region, the ambitions of Jemaah Islamiah is to create a pan-Islamic state stretching down and encompassing the southern Philippines, Malaya and Indonesia."

Costello will argue that separation of church and state is vital for the well-being of society, and is a concept that should be adopted in the Muslim world.

"I believe that a secular national state can be adopted by Muslim societies and, what is more, that doing so will lead to greater economic technological progress." he will announce."

On the arguments which have erupted since Pope Benedict XVI made his controversial speech on September 12 at Regensburg University, much has been made in the Islamic world of Benedict's reference to the words of the Byzantine emperor Manuel Paleologos II. Costello said he would not repeat the quote from the Byzantine leader, "because it would thoroughly detract from what I have to say."

Costello claims: "But it was said 700 years ago. Read the speech and wonder at the reaction. In response, we are told, seven churches were set on fire on the West Bank and Gaza, and effigies of the Pope were hung and burned in Pakistan."

"No doubt the fire bombers on the West Bank and the demonstrators in Pakistan would claim that their actions were incited by the 'insult' of the Pope's speech. But one can't help thinking that there are some people who love to find an insult and have no concept of proportionality when they do so."

"We are moved to think that there are other agendas here. And one of those agendas is to stifle free speech and legitimate open inquiry."

The Pope has called for a summit, to be held at his summer palace of Castel Gandolfo on Monday. Here he will invite Muslim leaders for tea and biscuits and a cozy chat about the anger his speech has provoked, despite his express apologies for causing offence.

Cardinal Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, has said that the debate on Pope Benedict's speech is now over. Pell himself had earlier drawn calls of protest from the Australian Muslim community for his comments on Islam and its innate violence.

The Pope is due to travel to Turkey next month, and it is vital for his mission, and also for his safety, that the issue of the controversial speech be resolved. Earlier this week, Turkish clerics called for the Pope to be arrested. Last week, Ali Bardakoglu, the senior cleric in Turkey, condemned the Pope and suggested his visit should be abandoned.

But one of the Vatican's cardinals has just made public his questioning of the advisability of Turkey joining the European Union, states the Times today. The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, was talking on BBC Radio 4 programme Today. Murphy-O'Connor, who is the spiritual leader of 4 million British Catholics, criticised the perspective of Tony Blair, who is an enthusiastic supporter of Turkey's right to join the EU.

He said: "There may be another view that the mixture of cultures is not a good idea.....I think the question is for Europe. Will the admission of Turkey to the European Union be something that benefits a proper dialogue or integration of a very large, predominantly Islamic, country in a continent that, fundamentally, is Christian?"

There is a validity in his comments, and Ruy Diaz and myself openly stated our opposition to the accession of Turkey to full membership of the EU. There is nothing wrong with Turkey being a recipient of open trade agreements, but politically and socially there is still a chasm between the Turkish outlook and the outlook of Europe.

On a mere religious level, the murder of Father Santoro on 5 February this year highlights the difficulty in reconciling cultures. An Islamist youth, shouting "Allahu Akbar", shot him in the back at his church in Trabzon, apparently outraged by the Danish cartoons of the so-called prophet Mohammed.

A month later, a Slovenian priest was seized by the throat and thrown into a garden at Izmir. His attackers shouted "Allahu Akbar" as they threatened to kill him. In the same city, a church was attacked with a firebomb thrown onto its roof.

On July 2, long after the issue of the Danish cartoons had apparently subsided, a colleague of Father Santoro was stabbed in the leg by a Muslim with a history of psychiatric problems. The man who stabbed and injured 74-year old Father Brunissen claimed the priest wanted him to convert from Islam. The incident took place at Samsun, a town on the Black Sea Coast, west of Trabzon where Andrea Santoro had his church.

There are 100,000 Christians in Turkey, and the authorities tolerate churches, but are not supportive. Officially, the Catholic Church does not exist in Turkey. Christians were actually better treated under Ottoman rule than under the regime of Kemal Ataturk, whom Costello praises. The church of Father Santoro, the Santa Maria Church in Trabzon was built in the 19th century during the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulmejid I.

In 1923, when modern Turkey was officially founded, about 1.5 million Orthodox Christians were expelled from Turkey and replaced by 356,000 Muslims from Greece.

Costello may state that Turkey is a model of Islamic nations, but it already has massive problems of terrorism caused by the Kurdish separatist group the PKK, who recently bombed tourist areas and have been mounting a virtual war against the west of Turkey. And there is still a strong Islamist presence in Turkey prepared to kill in the name of religion. Another Islamist group in Turkey is the Sunni "Hezbollah" group, who are mainly Kurdish and unrelated to the eponymous Shia groups of Lebanon and Syria. This group opposes secularism and mounted a campaign of torture and murder in the east of the country.

In May an Al Qaeda cell was broken up, which was preparing an attack against the military base at Incirlik, where US airforce divisions reside.

With full membership of the European Union will come the freedom of Turks to travel and settle in any part of Europe that they wish. Already in Germany, certain areas such as Neukoelln in Berlin have become no-go areas as the result of aggressive Muslim immigrants from Turkey. And there have been at least 40 instances of honor killings in Germany since 1996, the majority carried out by Turkish migrants from the eastern Kurdish regions.

In Turkey itself such killings were, until last year, given lesser sentences than murders, because a person who killed a relative for honour was said to have "mitigating circumstances". On 24 May, Yakin Erturk, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women visited the eastern regions of Turkey, where honour killings seemed to have been replaced with forced suicides.

She reported that: "The majority of women in the provinces visited live lives that are not their own but are instead determined by a patriarchal normative order that draws its strength from reference to tradition, culture and tribal affiliation and often articulates itself on the basis of distorted notions of honour."

"Diverse forms of violence are deliberately used against women who are seen to transgress this order. Suicides of women in the region occur within such a context.....I have found that the patriarchal order and the human rights violations that go along with it - for example, forced and early marriages, domestic violence, and denial of reproductive rights - are often key contributing factors."

Currently, the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and is AKP or Justice and Development Party is trying to erode the secular principles first introduced by Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey. The headscarf is banned in state institutions, but Erdogan has consisently tried to have this ruling removed. His wife Emine flaunts her hijab in public, as do wives of other ministers of the AKP. The hijab issue led to five judges being shot on May 17 in the Council of State in Ankara (the Supreme Court). One of the judges, Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin, died in the attack. The assailant, a lawyer, called out "Allahu Akbar" as he pulled the trigger on his Glock pistol.

Peter Costello may enthuse about the secular nation and principles of Turkey, as handed down by Ataturk, but even with these secular principles there is a tradition which is anathema to members of Western democracies. It comes in the form of Article 301 of the penal code. This is a law which states that it is an offense to criticise Turkey or "Turkishness".

Article 301 was introduced in the time of Ataturk. It prohibits anyone "who explicitly insults being a Turk, the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly", on penalty of receiving a three year jail sentence. Although the Islamist government of Erdogan is busily eroding every other aspect of the secularism enshrined in the constitution, it has been eager to exploit this legacy of the Ataturk years for its own ends. A key mover in exploiting this law to stifle freedom of speech is Turkey's Justice Minister, Cemil Cicek.

Various novelists, editors, publishers, visual artists and cartoonists have fallen foul of Article 301. Turkey's most famous novelist, Orhan Pamuk, was placed before the courts under this law on December 16. He had written of the tabu "genocide" of Armenians which happened around the time of the First World War, in which 1.5 million died. His case was abandoned on January 25 this year, but other cases were still outstanding. Pamuk's comments had been made in an interview in a Swiss magazine in February 2005.

Hrant Dink, who was given a six month suspended sentence on October 7 last year, still faces trial over statements he made in 2002 at a conference, Dink is the editor of the Armenian-language Agos magazine. The application of Article 301 is almost indiscriminate in the nature of its targets. Perlhan Magden was put on trial after she argued in favour of Mehmet Tarhan, a conscientious objector. By questioning Turkey's obligatory military service, she was accused of insulting "Turkishness". Orhan Pamuk called Magden "one of the most inventive and outspoken writers of our time".

But under Erdogan's regime, outspokenness is a potential crime, punishable by up to 3 years in jail. We wrote on June 18 of how visual artists and cartoonists were being prosecuted under Article 301 for insulting Erdogan. Erdogan sees himself as the embodiment of the Turkish state - "L'etat, c'est moi".

Article 301 is not the only tool in Justice Minister, Cemil Cicek's armory. Article 288 deprives journalists from the right of criticising any trial in action. This article of the Penal Code prohibits anyone from "attempting to influence a fair trial." When on September 18 last year columnist Murat Yetkin wrote in her newspaper column that the upcoming trial against Orhan Pamuk could affect the process of Turkey's accession to the EU, she unwittingly found herself breaking the law, and was facing trial on August 24 this year. The maximum penalty for breaking Article 288 is a prison term of four and a half years' jail. Several other editors and commenters have been tried under this law.

The latest victim of the more well-known Article 301, "insulting Turkey", was yesterday cleared of breaching this law. What is most shocking about this case is that novelist Elif Shafak was not prosecuted for something she said in her own right, but for what one of the characters in a novel states. The Times and the Telegraph report today that the case against the attractive and best-selling novelist had been brought, as in case of Orhan Pamuk, by Turkish nationalists, a bizarre breed, who are more close to communist apparatchiks than genuine lovers of Turkey.

In her novel The Bastard of Istanbul, Armenian characters refer to the tabu genocides of Armenians in 1915 - 1917.

Judge Irfan Adil Uncu at a court in Istanbul ordered that "The court concluded...there was insufficient evidence to suggest that she committed a crime." Even the prosecutor had read out a statement which claimed that Ms Shafak should be acquitted.

After the trial, Ms Shafak said she had been a victim of the "culture of lynching" which was emerging in Turkey. She said: "I am concerned about an idea that has recently developed in Turkey, the idea that 'those who do not think like us are co-operating with the enemy'."

Kemal Kerincsiz, the leader of the nationalists who brought the case against her said: "We are right to bring these cases. Characters in a novel may be fictitious, but the authors are real. In our culture, no one can brand their ancestors murderers."

Ms Shafak had not attended much of the trial, as during its progress she had given birth, by Caesarean section, to a baby.

Peter Costello may praise Ataturk, but there is much wrong with Turkey. I have been to Turkey and found the people friendly and welcoming. I knew some wonderful Turkish people, some of whom had endured horrors at the hands of the authorities. One woman I knew from Hackney, a beautiful, sophisticated and very Westernised individual, shocked me when she said that her brother had been tortured to death in police custody.

Turkey is caught between two worlds, the ancient world of the Ottomans, whose legacy persists in the southeastern regions, and the sophisticated, libertarian culture as found in Istanbul and the west of Turkey. The best parts of Turkey come not from Ataturk, and not from Islam, but from the people themselves. Sadly, the political machinations of Erdogan's Islamists and the dour Ataturk-loving nationalists, not to mention the PKK and the radical Islamists, mean that Turkey is still far from being a role model, either for a Muslim nation or for a Western nation. The Ataturk-supporting nationalists are as much an enemy of freedom of speech as are the cronies of Erdogan, who even ban Winnie the Pooh from state television, because the hero's best friend is a haram little pink pig - Piglet.

Until Turkey can resolve its inner tensions, it is not ready to join Europe. With its own bi-polar issues remaining unmedicated, Turkey will, if brought into the EU in its current form, bring with it its illnesses and all of its problems. Even the unresolved issue of accession to the European Union is now further polarising Turkey along gender-based, nationalistic, religious and political fault lines.

I like Turkey, and I like the Turkish people I have known. But within its borders are groups, movements and ideas which will forever be alien to the West.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at September 22, 2006 7:54 PM

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