Religious Education and 4+4+4

PHOTO from Birgun

Fast approaching the anniversary of the Feb. 28 process, or the 1997 "postmodern coup" that brought about the fall of the Islamist Refah government and a slate of reforms to defend secularism against what was perceived by some as the encroaching threat posed by political Islam, the government has announced plans to restructure Turkish education.

Reforms include provisions that would allow school children to receive education at religious (imam-hatip) high schools after completing four years of primary education or pursue distance learning (essentially "home school") courses. At the moment, students are required to complete eight years of education before being allowed to complete the final four years at imam-hatip, which combine traditional and religious education. Under the new law, education would be structured into three four-year segments: four years primary (ilk), four years middle (orta), and four years high school (lise), and hence the 4+4+4. The government is arguing the new law is an improvement since all 12 years will be mandatory even if it is to be completed at home.

The problems with the law should be apparent, and late this week earned the denunciation of the Turkish Businessmen and Industrialists' Association (TUSIAD) and prominent opinion leader and entrepreneur Guler Sabanci. In rural areas, particularly in the east and southeast where children, particularly girls, already do not go to school, the law would greatly diminish educational standards. Parents in these areas are often not well-educated themselves (this is an understatement), and would not be capable of providing a quality education. Further, child labor is a tremendous problem (see past post) and girls are frequently kept at home (for more on this, see past post; see also the above advertisement from a 2010 campaign launched by Milliyet urging fathers to send their daughters to school).

The proposed law also allows for provision that would reduce the age of apprenticeship to 11, though it is still unclear to me as to how an apprenticeship works. (Is it pursued concurrent with other curriculum? Does it allow one to withdraw from school entirely? Would this possibly trigger more child labor?) The apprenticeship is also chief among TUSIAD's concerns (for more, click here).

On Wednesday, the parliament sub-commission for education took up the bill after a debate by a wider debate by a larger commission. Though the AKP has been sensitive to criticisms coming from groups such as TUSIAD and has expressed some willingness to compromise, it is unclear just how many of the proposed provisions could be made law. The sub-commission is scheduled to take the draft up once more on Feb. 28 after some tweaking from party officials. For an account in English, click here.

Cumhuriyet columnist Utku Cakirozer frames the recent move within the context of the Feb. 28 process. Cakirozer refers to measures put into play soon after the coup that required all students to attend eight years of primary education (from five to eight) before dropping out or enrolling in imam-hatip. The generals also restricted Koran courses. Students were not allowed to enroll in Koran courses until after their fifth year of school, and courses were subject to inspection by the Directorate of Religious Affairs, or Diyanet. Penalties, including prison sentences for parents who did not send their children to schools or sent their children to Koran courses before they were old enough. In addition, operators of illegal Koran courses were also subject to penalties.

Gradually, the AKP government has whittled away at what some might read as particularly intrusive restrictions, particularly on religious education. In 2003, prison sentences were replaced with fines; in 2004, parliament reduced the sentence for running an illegal Koran course from three years to one and ended and authorities ceased closing down illegal courses; in 2005, the Diyanet ceased inspecting Koran courses; and after last June's elections, the minimum age for Koran courses was eliminated. According to Cakirozer, the goal is now to do away with the eight-year rule for uninterrupted education.


As it inevitably does, the headscarf also falls into the debate. As Cakirozer points out, young girls wearing the headscarf (as young as fifth grade) will now be allowed to do so at imam-hatip, effectively ending the ban. I care more about the fact that these children will simply not receive the same quality of education as I do about an effective end to the ban after that age (the ban was one of the reasons driving the government to do this to begin with), but it is important to note that is also important for many critics of the new law (for another example, see this coverage from Hurriyet).

Other columnists and opinion leaders see the law as a broad-based effort to increase the influence of Islamist education, particularly imam-hatip and Koran courses. For an example, see Egitim-Is head Veli Demir's comments in Melih Asik's column in Milliyet.


UPDATE I (2/27) -- Nicole Pope's column in Today's Zaman offers a solid English-language analysis summing up the threat the proposed law poses to Turkish education.

Women, the Headscarf, and Discrimination in the Work Place

This month the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), one of the country's leading think-tanks, released a study examining employment discrimination against women who wear the headscarf. While the headscarf has long been a controversial issue in the public arena (for more, click here and here), much less attention has been paid to the issue in the private realm. What obstacles are faced by women who wear the headscarf and do manage to graduate from university (or, for those who may choose to don it after graduation)? For the report, authored by TESEV's Dilek Cindoglu, click here.

The rate of women's employment in Turkey is lower than any other OECD  country--21.6%, and down from 34.3% in 1988. The average in the European Union is 57%. Female employment has been dropping for a variety of reasons, among them the decline in agricultural employment. However, apart from structural changes to the economy, a number of impediments prevent women from entering the workforce, including the low level of female education, the lack of adequate childcare facilities, sexual harassment, and conservative attitudes when it comes to women working and leaving the house/traveling about. Another is no doubt the systematic labor discrimination that women who choose to wear the headscarf face both in terms of getting a job and no doubt once they are in a job as well.

The headscarf has long been seen as an obstacle to women's employment, though camps on both sides of the issue face the issue differently. Pro-headscarf advocates argue that limitations on covered women entering university poses a serious hindrance to their position in higher-level unemployment, and that once out of university, women continue to face discrimination, and often, outright ridicule. Proponents of restrictions on headscarves, including some women's rights groups, argue the headscarf is a function of conservative, patriarchal attitudes, and that frequently it is the attitudes of covered women's families, most importantly, their husbands, that keep them out of the workplace. This study very much disputes this notion in documenting cases where women choose to work, and in many cases, where their employment is necessary to the livelihood of their family. Cindoglu, along with Ebru Ilhan, published a similar study on the subject last summer.

Last fall, Richard Peres wrote an excellent article in Today's Zaman discussing the issue, as well as the prospects for Turkey to adopt a remedy along the lines of the affirmative action policies the United States put in place for African Americans in the 1960s. From Peres's article (which I stumbled upon thanks to Jenny White at Kamil Pasha, who adds some thoughts of her own here):

In addition to professionals, women who wear headscarves face perhaps the largest and most difficult barrier in white collar jobs. Preference is given to uncovered women for the better positions in private industry, such as office and information workers, as well as sales positions. The reasons vary from simple prejudice against covered women to organizations not wanting to be viewed as fundamentalist. According to a report by AKDER in November 2008, “Even in sectors for production of commercial goods and services, the employment level of the women who wear the headscarf is low.”

I have a friend who wears a headscarf who had to go to Cyprus for her college degree. She is bilingual -- she helped me interview Turks for a book I am writing -- but has been unable to find a white collar job for over a year. Often when she shows up for an interview, she finds that the position has been mysteriously filled or is no longer available. She has little recourse but to keep trying or to migrate to another country.

. . . .

s Turkey ready to implement a remedy for discrimination against covered women like the American experience? I doubt it. The reason: The American civil rights movement was the result of a long political struggle that mobilized millions of people throughout the country to bring about change. African-Americans and women did not sit back and wait for one political party or another to effect change, or for an agency like the Higher Education Board (YÖK) to send a letter. They got organized, influenced elections directly, exposed discrimination, fought cases in court, ran for elections, and put real political pressure on state legislatures and the US Congress. Waiting for the government to act was not enough to bring about landmark legislation with real enforcement power and supportive agencies to handle and investigate complaints, and go to court on the behalf of complainants if necessary.

That said, there is a decent amount of activism on the issue, like this TESEV report, as well as from organizations like the Women’s Rights Association Against Discrimination (AK-DER). Nonetheless, I have met more than covered woman who has told me she does not participate in such activism because the cause seems hopeless, etc. Yet, last fall's relaxing of headscarf requirements at university and the amount of progress being made on the issue is likely to spark more activism and pressure.

If you should be in Washington, Cinodoglu will present the study at SETA-DC tomorrow at 12 p.m. Merve Kavakci will serve as discussant. Click here for event details.

"No Headscarves, No Vote!"

Merve Kavakci in 1999, shortly before being expelled from parliament.

Nicholas Birch has an excellent piece on Eurasianet about a new civil society campaign geared to promote the election of women who wear the headscarf and the ambivalent response the campaign has received from conservatives, including the AKP. An excerpt:

Turkish women's groups have been traditionally divided along ideological lines. But they are uniting behind the initiative, launched in March by a non-partisan group called Women Meet Halfway, to have women who wear headscarves placed high enough up on party lists so that they stand a decent chance of being elected.

"No headscarves, no vote," shouted sixty-odd women who gathered outside the parliament building in Ankara on April 8. "As it stands, our democracy is half-baked", said the group's spokeswoman, Nesrin Semiz. "Two-thirds of Turkish women cover their heads. Not one of them has a seat in parliament."

The campaign is generating an ambiguous reaction from an electoral constituency that, at least at first glance, would appear to be a natural ally: religiously conservative men.

In general, the conservative press is trying to ignore the campaign. Those columnists who have addressed it have tended to be disparaging. A columnist in the mass-market conservative daily Zaman, Mehmet Kamis, has described the headscarf issue as "meaningless."

"These elections are a vital opportunity for Turkey to create the foundations of civilian democracy," he wrote on April 2. "Why put that at risk with all this talk of headscarves." Kamis was alluding to the main plank of the governing Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) election campaign: the promise of a new "civilian" constitution.

The AKP has Islamist roots, and the wives of some top party leaders wear headscarves in public, but those same party leaders make no secret of wanting to win more than two-thirds of the seats in parliament. Such a total would allow the AKP to push through a new constitution on its own. Party leaders worry that strong backing for the headscarf issue could complicate their electoral goal. Yet, they also know that distancing themselves from the issue could create political problems.

. . . .

Supporters of Women Meet Halfway's campaign think fears of a repeat of 2008 or 1999 are unfounded. The Constitutional Court, which narrowly voted against closing the AKP in 2008, has since been packed with justices sympathetic to the governing party, campaign member Hilal Kaplan points out.

A secular party that lobbied hard for the court’s intervention against the AKP in 2008, meanwhile, has signaled that it will take no action, if women wearing headscarves are elected to parliament.

In any case, says Fatma Bostan Unsal, a founding member of the AKP who wears a headscarf and has put her name forward as a candidate, there is nothing in parliamentary regulations about headscarves -- only a requirement for women to wear "suits." Turkish courts stripped Kavakci of her position in 1999 not because of her headwear, but because she had become a US citizen "without the permission of the Turkish authorities."

Unsal says she will run as an independent if the AKP doesn't support headscarf-wearing candidates. With just under nine weeks to go until Turks go to the polls, she still doesn't know what colors she will be presenting herself under: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the arbiter of who rises and who falls in the AKP, is keeping his options wide open.

But a ferocious attack last week on the headscarf campaign by one of Turkey's most prominent Islamist intellectuals has led some women to wonder whether all the high-minded talk of the need to protect the AKP from a repeat of 2008 isn't hiding something rather less savory. Writing in Zaman on April 2, Ali Bulac described the campaign’s leaders as "fifth columnists ... working from the start to destroy the Islamist movement from within."

Supporting the use of the headscarf is "a religious obligation of every believing man and woman," Bulac went on. But the campaigners "look down their noses at their own neighborhoods," and "have stripped the headscarf of its religious significance, reducing it to a simple issue of human rights inspired by feminism."

Hilal Kaplan has written in Taraf and elsewhere that it is a shame that covered women, which constitute a considerable percentage of people in Turkey, do not have even one representative in parliament.

Bulent Arinc said in February that while having a covered woman in parliament was desirable, no was not the time. Apparently the AKP as a whole agreed with him. Only one covered woman was nominated for parliament, and her name placed very low on the party list, lessening her chances of getting elected.

The last candidate who donned the headscard to be elected to parliament, Merve Kavakci in 1999 from the Virtue Party, was expelled from parliament and eventually stripped of her Turkish citizenship on the grounds that she had not disclosed her United States citizenship.  In 2007, Kavakci won a case at the European Court of Rights, which determined her expulsion from parliament was a human right violation.

For more on female electoral candidates and the headscarf, click here for a piece I wrote on the issue in 2008.

United States Issues Religious Freedom Report

The United States Department has issued its annual International Religious Freedom Report. For DRL's report on Turkey, click here.

Though many accusations might be leveled at the United States for not taking a consistent position on democracy and human rights issues, a difficult task for any country, the State Department's reports on human rights and religious freedom are refreshingly objective.

Issued by the State Department's Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, the reports are issued independent of the State Department's other policy making arms. For a bit on how, why, and the history behind these reports, click here.

The Headscarf and Women's Employment

The Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV) has released a new study authored by Dilek Cindoglu and Ebru Ilhan documenting discrimation faced by female employees wearing the headscarf. Bianet gives a summary of the results:

* According to research conducted by KONDA and MetroPOLL in 2008, 71-72 percent of all women cover their head, while only eleven percent of female university graduates wear headscarves. A study by World Bank and the State Planning Organization revealed that these women's participation in labour dropped from 50 percent in 1998 to 35 percent in 2006.

* The two working areas in which women are represented the most are as unpaid family workers in agriculture and as trained professionals.

* The women wearing headscarves at university are not a homogenous group. Religious affiliations of these women differ as well as their level of political interest, adoption and level of traditional values, the level of individual religiosity and their economic and social capital.

* The headscarf ban is the most basic field of conflict for young professionally trained women with headscarves.

* Wearing a headscarf at work is part of these professional women's religiosity and individuality. They are respected by their colleagues and especially by men in lower positions. The headscarf makes them feel safer on the street and at work.

* When women wearing headscarves have to include a photograph in their CV, they are more likely to face difficulty related to salary policies or when they are made redundant. They hear things such as "It is anyway a blessing to work here" or "You do not have to financially support a family", respectively.

* Employers want women wearing headscarves to be 'invisible'. They should either be 'invisible', take off their headscarf or should not publicly represent the company. This means that they are not participating in meeting with clients or in training courses and that they are kept away from work related to state offices.

* Employers focus on traditional patriarchal patterns thinking that even though the woman is working, she does not actually have to support the family. This way, employment of women wearing headscarves is being marginalized.

* Women wearing a headscarf in business perceive that they experience discrimination and obstructions almost entirely by reason of their "headscarf".

See also this report from Hurriyet Daily News that includes pieces of an interview with Cindoglu.
The headscarf has long been seen as an obstacle to women's employment, though camps on both sides of the issue face the issue differently. Pro-headscarf advocates argue that limitations on headscarved women entering university poses a serious hindrance to their position in higher-level unemployment, and that once out of university, women continue to face discrimination, and often, outright ridicule. Proponents of restrictions on headscarves, including some women's rights groups, argue the headscarf is a function of conservative, patriarchal attitudes, and that frequently it is the attitudes of headscarved women's families, most importantly, their husbands, that keep them out of the workplace.

This study very much disputes this notion in documenting cases where women choose to work, and in many cases, where their employment is necessary to the livelihood of their family.

A Looming Judicial Coup?

The Supreme Court of Appeals has requested information and documents from the Higher Education Council (YOK) regarding its amendment of coefficents used to calculate the college entrance exam scores of students graduating from imam-hatip and vocational schools. Though the Court's Chief Prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, has played down rumors of a pending closure case, the document request only heightens the alert. A formal investigation has yet to be launched by the Chief Prosecutor, though plenty of digging is already clearly going on.

For more on the context of the possible closure case (and the Cihaner-Sanal showdown in the judiciary), see Feb. 21 post with updates. Also, for more on last week's crisis following the mass arrests starting last Monday, see Feb. 24 post with updates.


UPDATE I (3/6) -- The YOK has sent documents requested by Yalcinkaya to the Supreme Court of Appeals.

The ECHR, the Aczmendis, and Bad Reporting

PHOTO from Hurriyet Daily News

From Hurriyet:

The European Court of Human Rights approved a complaint by a Turkish religious group regarding clothing regulations during hearings in Turkish courts.

The case was filed by Müslüm Gündüz and 126 other members of the Aczmendi community, which describes itself as an Islamic order, reported broadcaster CNNTürk on Tuesday.

The groups’ special attire consists of wearing black robes and a black turban, while males in the community have long beards.

The court had already ruled in favor of Gündüz in two instances against Turkey, both in 2003 for violations of his freedom of expression, and in 2005, for violations of his right to a fair trial.

The European court has now ruled that Aczmendis can attend court hearings in the outfit of their choice.

Gündüz, who founded the Aczmendi community, graduated from an Elazığ evening school 1985 and is an alleged member of the Islamic Nurcu movement.

Today's Zaman has a different account of the case, reporting that the ECHR "ruled that the 1997 conviction of 127 Turkish citizens for a breach both of the law on the wearing of headgear and of the rules on the wearing of certain garments, specifically religious garments, in public other than for religious ceremonies were found to be a violation of Article 9 of the convention." According to the Today's Zaman article, "the [Aczmendis] met in Ankara for a religious ceremony held at the Kocatepe Mosque. They toured the city streets while wearing the distinctive dress of their group, which comprised a turban, şalvar (baggy trousers), a tunic and a stick. Following various incidents on the same day, they were arrested and placed in police custody."

However, neither Today's Zaman nor Hurriyet Daily News have the entire story. In fact, the ECHR ruled that the Aczmendis, in this particular circumstance, could not be convicted (as they had been in 1997) for wearing religious garb in "public." Also, contrary to the Hurriyet Daily News, public places are not limited to "hearings," but all public places, including the march the group held. Generally both papers reporting is much better, but perhaps the ECHR is still a difficult subject on which to report since it is a bit different system about which Turkish opinion leaders have learned a lot in only the past few years as its decisions have come to play a greater role.

From the ECHR press release :

It was established that the applicants had not received criminal-law convictions for indiscipline or lack of respect before the State Security Court, but rather for their manner of dressing in public areas that were open to everyone (such as public streets or squares), a manner that was held to be contrary to the legislative provisions.

The applicants’ conviction for having worn the clothing in question fell within the ambit of Article 9 – which protected, among other things, the freedom to manifest one’s religious beliefs – since the applicants were members of a religious group and considered that their religion required them to dress in that manner. Accordingly, the Turkish courts’ decisions had amounted to interference in the applicants’ freedom of conscience and religion, the legal basis for which was not contested (the law on the wearing of headgear and regulations on the wearing of certain garments in public).

It could be accepted, particularly given the importance of the principle of secularism for the democratic system in Turkey, that this interference pursued the legitimate aims of protection of public safety, prevention of disorder and protection of the rights and freedoms of others. However, the sole reasoning given by the Turkish courts had consisted in a reference to the legal provisions and, on appeal, a finding that the disputed conviction was in conformity with the law.

The Court further emphasised that this case concerned punishment [Emphasis Added] for the wearing of particular dress in public areas that were open to all [Emphasis Added], and not, as in other cases that it had had to judge, regulation of the wearing of religious symbols in public establishments, where religious neutrality might take precedence over the right to manifest one’s religion.

In a 2005 ruling, Leyla Sahin v. Turkey, the ECHR ruled Turkey had a legitimate interest in banning the headscarf (türban) in public universities and other state institutions.

On Neighborhood Pressure

Professor Binnaz Toprak, Bahcesehir Universitesi PHOTO from The Balkans Project


In 2008, the Open Society Institute, in cooperation with Bogazici University, published "Being Different in Turkey: Alienation on the Axis of Religion and Conservatism." Professor Binnaz Toprak led the polemical study, which instantly garnered criticism throughout the conservative press. Conducting research in 12 Anatolian towns, Professor Toprak and her colleagues documented concrete incidents of "neighborhood pressure," a concept first discussed by Serif Mardin who coined the term to describe the pressure some people in Anatolia experience because they are different. They might be different because they are Alevi or some other religious minority, speak Kurdish, or because they drink alcohol and/or wear an earring and have long hair. The reaction to the report's arguments no doubt stems from their similarity to the argument some secularists/Kemalists make to justify the headscarf ban in universities -- that is, if women are allowed to wear the headscarf in universities, other women will feel pressure to do the same lest they be judged as less moral, religious, etc. However, despite the similarity, the report delved deeper, examining the toleration of difference in the 12 Anatolian towns it explores.

I allude to the study now because the debate has once again appeared -- this time on a new blog, Changing Turkey in a Changing World -- and because the exchange is just as relevant now as it was in December 2008. Professor Ahmet Kuru, who is currently at Columbia University's School of International Public Affairs (SIPA), posted a criticism of the report, to which Toprak responds by reiterating many of the arguments she made defending it when it was published a little over one year ago. Also worth reading is a recent interview Toprak conducted with John Feffer of Washington's Institute for Policy Studies' (IPS) Balkans Project. In the interview, Toprak discusses growing conservative attitudes and the headscarf issue.

UPDATE I (2/20) -- Efes Managing Director Tugrul Agribas complains of "neighborhood pressure." From Hurriyet:

Speaking to reporters in Şanlıurfa on Wednesday, Ağırbaş said the company aims to expand the beer market in Turkey, but the number of sales points has diminished to around 83,000 from nearly 100,000 four years ago.

“The per capita beer consumption in Turkey is around 12 to 13 liters,” he said. “The European average is 100 liters. What spurs consumption is restaurants, cafes and pubs. But in Turkey, each consumer pays a special consumption tax that is nine times more than the tax paid in Germany, for example.”

Beer sales points have problems in getting licenses or renewing them, Ağırbaş said. “Beer is a key source of revenue for corner stores and kiosks. Rakı, beer and cigarettes together constitute 70 percent of a grocer’s revenue. When you take out rakı and beer, the grocer starts having a hard time,” he said. “Those who wish to open sales points cannot find places to rent. Others face neighborhood pressure. Meanwhile, chain stores are destroying corner stores.”

"Fight!"

PHOTO from video footage shot by CNN Turk (More CNN Turk video of the confrontation can be accessed through the Hurriyet Daily News by clicking here)

In my absence from regular blogging last week as a result of dealing with a serious bout of food poisoning, I missed posting coverage of the fistfight that broke out in Parliament last week following the perceived insulting of Prime Minister Erdogan. The clash took place between AKP and MHP parliamentarians, and left one AKP MP hospitalized after he had a stroke. From Hürriyet:

MHP deputy Osman Durmuş sarcastically said, “How do you [the hospital] not let the wife of a prime minister who is regarded as prophet come into the hospital?”

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan mentioned in a televised interview Sunday that his wife had been denied entry to a military hospital, the Gülhane Military Medical Academy, or GATA, three years ago when she tried to visit actor Nejat Uygur while wearing a headscarf.

Erdoğan said his wife Emine Erdoğan wanted to visit Uygur in the hospital and that Uygur’s wife had said they would be honored by the visit. Uygur’s wife then informed hospital officials of the intended visit but the latter said GATA could not allow Erdoğan to enter because of her headscarf.

During the parliamentary session late Tuesday, MHP deputy Durmuş sarcastically said: “It is the [nasty] white collar doctors [who didn’t allow her to enter the hospital]. How do you not let the wife of a prime minister who is regarded as prophet come into the hospital?”

Durmuş’s words drew a fierce reaction from AKP deputies, including Erdoğan, leading to a fistfight between AKP and MHP deputies. Some deputies were slightly injured while one deputy was hospitalized.

Taking the floor for the second time, Durmuş recalled one of the AKP member’s earlier remarks describing Erdoğan as the second prophet.

On the floor, Erdoğan said: “First of all, our friends don’t know that the chain of prophecy ended with our last prophet [Mohammed]. And, you also lacked intelligence as to defend those who didn’t let her enter GATA. Nobody who attributes such an adjective to me can keep their place in our party. You cannot insult my wife. This is crude and immoral."

. . . .

Durmuş's comment referred to a remark made by Ismail Hakkı Eser in November 2008. In a speech, the AKP’s Aydın provincial council member said, “Erdoğan is like the second prophet for us.”

On Wednesday, Eser resigned from the party.

AKP Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc followed the series up with a visit to acting CHP parliamentary speaker Guldal Mumcu's room, criticizing Mumcu for not keeping better control of the session. Mumcu and the CHP then complained about executive meddling in parliamentary affairs. Erdogan followed the incident up with accusations that the MHP and the CHP are one in the same. The MHP worked with the AKP in February 2008 to pass a constitutional amendment paving the way for women to wear the headscarf in universities in a limited fashion. That amendment was later annulled by the Constitutional Court, but speaks to MHP's efforts to make inroads among the conservative voters that have been attracted to the AKP over the issue.

In another interesting development, the Turkish Armed Forces' Chief of General Staff Ilker Basbug has said that he regrets Ms. Erdogan was denied entrance to the military hopsital, calling the incident "unfortunate." Today's Zaman columnist Fatma Disli Zibak considers whether Basbug has softened his position on the headscarf issue.

And, for another take, Nicole Pope wonders how children can be tried as adults for offenses she considers similar to those modelled by MPs.

While politicians behave like kindergartners in Parliament and get away with it, it is somewhat ironic -- and tragic -- that real children, the ones you would expect to get into scraps, are being tried as adults in courts around the country on terrorism charges for taking part in protests.

Stone throwers are not the only teenagers targeted by the judiciary. Three minors face jail sentences in Bursa after being charged with “insulting the prime minister” by referring to him as “lightbulb Erdoğan.” The court based its decision on a definition of the word “lightbulb” provided by Google, and deemed it insulting.

There is a link between the unedifying sight of grown-up men charging at each other, broadcast across the country, and the detention of young people. Such scenes carry consequences: they ratchet up the tension and increase polarization in society. Perhaps an R rating for bad language and the use of violence should apply to political discussions.

Is it surprising that teenagers, with the idealism and enthusiasm that characterizes the young, should express their views in ways that are sometimes extreme and misguided when confrontation is the norm in the political arena?

UPDATE I (2/9)-- The three students facing jail sentences for the "lightbulb" statements to which Pope alludes hale from Bursa, where another student sentenced last year for making the same remark. Citing Google, the Bursa court in that case ruled the student was not in his rights since the remarks constituted an insult and could not be considered legitimate political speech. Though not children, members of parliament have immunity from such charges, or from breaking into fistfights, which is not an altogether extraordinary event in Turkey's Grand National Assembly.

UPDATE II (2/11) -- Arinc has apologized for some of the comments he made to Mumcu after saying earlier he would apologize if she wanted him to, though he would stand by the correctness of his criticism. Also, President Gul, while on a state visit in India, urged the media not to cover controversies occuring between politicians so as to not increase the social tension they produce.

Victory for Graduates of Imam-Hatip Schools

From Jenny White at Kamil Pasha:

Graduates of theological high schools and other vocational schools will now be able to enter college on the same basis as graduates of academic high schools. On Tuesday, the Higher Education Board’s (YÖK) General Council abolished the system of using a lower coefficient to calculate the university admission examination (Student Selection Examination [ÖSS]) scores of graduates of vocational high schools. Entrance to a college and field of study is decided exclusively by the student’s score in a single nation-wide exam, leading to an entire separate industry of private cram schools that remains unaffected by this ruling. In the old YÖK system, graduates of vocational high schools had points deducted from their admission scores when they applied to a university department unrelated to their curriculum. This system made it more difficult, for instance, for an imam-hatip high school graduate to gain entrance to medical school than a student from a normal high school with the same ÖSS score.

Professor White goes on to explain the formation of imam-hatip schools and the lower co-efficients, as well as to note that the reform will have little impact on türban-wearing women whom are restricted from entering public universities. For coverage from Today's Zaman, which has a pro-headscarf perspective, click here.

Honing in on CHP

At Turkey's founding as an independent state, Atatürk embraced the European ideals of the age in a way that no Ottoman sultan had ever imagined and at his death in 1938, Anatolia looked and felt drastically different than it had at Turkey's founding in 1923. Indeed, Atatürk not only embraced European values, but emulated them. Modelling the new Turkic republic on the European states of the day, the "Immortal Leader" adopted European legal codes and replaced Ottoman institutions to resemble those of Europe. Central to this nation-building project was Atatürk's wholesale adoption of the same European-style nationalisms that were reshaping Europe. As David Fromkin sadly narrates in A Peace to End All Peace, Turkey was not alone in this endeavor, but was undoubtedly the most successful. Unlike other nation-states carved out of the former Ottoman Empire, the Turkish nation-state was not designed by Europeans, but by Atatürk. Building atop the nationalist ideology of the Young Turks who preceded him, Atatürk carved Turkey out along the same nationalist lines that had come to shape those communities in the Americas and Europe to which Benedict Anderson has referred as "imagined." As one of the first nationalist movements organized against imperialist power, Atatürk brought together the peoples of Anatolia as Turks, romanized the Turkish language, worked to establish nationalist narratives of a shared tribal past, and sought diligently to "Turkify" the Ottoman institutions that had previously governed the Anatolian heartland. An ardent admirer of the French Revolution, Atatürk assembled Turkish nationalism along French lines, an educated, noble project built in the name of modernity, progress, and Enlightenment rationalism. Indeed, many of Turkey's liberals have come to denigrate the Turkish nationalist project as "Jacobin," inferring that just as French revolutionists reached particularly troubling and misguided excesses, so do some similarly self-avowed Turkish nationalists.

The nation-state pervaded what was both a project for state and society and came to define Kemalism, a loose-based ideology prescribing the political order that is still very much descriptive of contemporary relations between the Turkish state and society. Kemalism was defined in 1931 by CHP, the country's only political party in operation at the time. If one was (is?) a Kemalist, one swore adherence to what CHP considered to be the six principles of the state's existence: secularism (bearing close resemblance to French laicism), nationalism (very much influenced by European conceptions of flag and country), republicanism (in the sense that the Jacobins rejected French monarchy only to install institutions that would hardly be considered democratic by contemporary definitions), populism (very much resonant in European discourse following the First World War as it placed the interests of the nation over those of class politics, feared in Europe as Bolshevik), revolutionism (Orwellian insomuch as this meant specific support of the Kemalist status quo), and statism (recognizing the dominance of the state in the economic realm along similar lines and thought of in relation to European étatisme). The endurance of Kemalism is evidenced by CHP's continued symbolic use of the six arrows (alti ok)in its party emblem. These principles were incorporated into the Turkish constitution in 1937 and continue to be the foundation of Turkish governance. (Previously posted on Sept. 16.)

Although CHP ventured leftward during the 1960s and 1970s, placing a great amount of its emphasis on social and economic issues in opposition to the center-right, the party remained for the most part true to its laicist approach to Islam, its statist reproach for federalism, and its nationality-based understanding of Turkish citizenship. While its commitment to laicism prevented it from making inroads with religious Turks, its statism/nationalism compromised the party's ability to deal effectively with ethnic minorities. Here, I think it is useful to note that the CHP, especially during the 1970s, was championed by the country's Alevi religious minority, whose support for secularism and democratic socialism fit well with the CHP agenda. Revealing here is that Alevi identity is largely religious, and not ethnically based, and that Alevis saw their rights against a Sunni religious majority as guaranteed by CHP's commitment to secularism. (I have written some about this right-left conflict in my historical tracing of MHP and the extreme Turkish "right.") Whereas nationalist groups on the right have traditionally been both ethnically and religiously chauvinist, CHP's nationalism is more narrowly tailored, keeping religion well removed from state affairs while protecting what many in the party see as the integrity of the Turkish nation. After the 1980 coup, and largely as a function of leftist politics being marginalized in the public sphere, CHP focused less on social democracy, and more on issues pertaining to secularism, state security, and Turkish nationality. Even as Turkey opened up in the 1990s, this remained a large part of the party's focus, and in recent years, under the leadership of Deniz Baykal, so much so and to the exclusion of any legitimate leftist agenda that the party was threatened with expulsion from the Socialist International. Turkish citizens have also decried the party's abandonment of any meaningfully leftist politics -- for example, see Genç Siviller. (I have explored these issues before in previous posts, see especially my Feb. 12 post of last year.)

CHP leader Deniz Baykal places a CHP pin on a woman's chador this past November. Baykal proclaimed that no Turkish citizen should be discriminated against based on their attire, a reversal of his party's staunch political and legal opposition to constitutional amendments made just last January to allow covered women to enter university under certain conditions.

Although CHP affirmed these dogmas in its party convention this past April and amidst the AKP closure case, it seems the party has turned an about face ahead of upcoming local elections. For example, in a most controversial and stunningly surprising move, the party has endorsed opening CHP membership to female candidates and party members who wear chadors. In Baykal's words: "It is not right to discriminate against people because of what they wear. It is not right to make deductions about them based on their attire." The move is particularly bizarre given that the chador is in many ways more controversial than the headscarf, although the debate about Islamic garb and politics is quite complicated. (See Mustafa Şentop's discussion of the chador initiative.) However, polls revealed the political acumen behind such a move, which is surely designed to capture religious conservatives and perhaps even some liberals who have long been disenchanted with Baykal's CHP. Some liberals praised the move as progressive, and the opening was hailed by Joost Lagendijk, co-chairman of the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary Committee, as a welcome step forward.

Perhaps most surprising is that CHP's turnabout also includes criticism of the early republican period, previous criticism of which has landed journalists, politicians, and intellectuals like Atilla Yayla in jail. On December 3, Baykal declared, "“People with traditional clothes were not allowed to enter Atatürk Avenue [in Ankara] then. They were ordered to change their clothes and wear modern ones to be able to enter the avenue. We are a political party. Will we classify people in accordance with their attire? Is this possible? This is Turkey. People may wear whatever they want and go wherever they want.” Such comments were spiritedly reported in the liberal press:

"Little time left before second republicanism," the Taraf daily announced on its front page yesterday, implying that the secularist politician may set Kemalism aside and turn to a new understanding of republicanism.

Star's [Mehmet] Altan shared the same belief, saying that Baykal's new move stands as a litmus test for his commitment to becoming a new type of republican or, in other words, a next-generation liberal.

"When the CHP received a harsh defeat at the hands of the AK Party in the July 22, 2007 elections, party officials pointed to Baykal as the reason for the failure and accused him of turning his back on second republicanism. Second republicanism means to make the republic more democratic and save it from Kemalism. The CHP leader is going through self-criticism and heading toward second republicanism," he noted.

However, there are also many skeptics, such as TDZ columnist Fatma Disli and Marmara University Professor Levent Köker. Just what CHP tends to do in terms of securing actual policy in line with its newly expressed sentiments is unclear, but it is unlikely that Baykal will be able to counter much of this skepticism given CHP's past history without taking serious steps to renounce the party's past policy decisions, including its vehement opposition to the headscarf amendments last spring. As Saban Kardas at EDM reports, the move has also caused fighting within CHP: [

T]he “chador initiative” has provoked enmity within the CHP. Baykal’s call for a critical reflection on the party’s past angered more radical voices. Necla Arat, a parliamentary deputy from Istanbul and one of the fervent advocates of the headscarf ban, disparaged Baykal. She said that “criticizing practices during the era of Ataturk and Ismet Inonu [the second president of Turkey] because of ‘one-party-rule’ is unfortunate. My friends and I have started wondering whether the party is betraying its heritage [reddi miras].” Scores of other CHP deputies reportedly share Arat’s opinion (Hurriyet, December 4).

A rather surprising attack on Baykal came from the leader of the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), Devlet Bahceli, who said that this issue was, in fact, a non-issue and did not correspond to the real problems of the people. He said, “As part of the Greater Middle East Project, there is an attempt to shape Turkish politics through moderate Islam… The Right pillar of moderate Islam is the AKP…Is there an attempt to erect a Left pillar of moderate Islam through this opening?” (Anadolu Ajansi, December 9).

Baykal issued a written response to Bahceli, in which he drew a distinction between a legitimate right to certain religious freedoms and moderate Islam as a political project. Baykal attacked Bahceli by saying, “only those who either abuse religion or come from a tradition of setting political traps [referring to the MHP’s controversial role in urging the AKP to pass the constitutional amendments on headscarves] will dislike this [the CHP’s defense of religious freedom]” (ANKA, December 10).

Baykal indeed took a bold step by opening one-party rule to debate and indicating that the CHP would defend religious freedom, but there are grounds for being skeptical about the prospects of the “chador initiative.” As political scientist Bekir Berat Ozipek says, having ruled the country single-handedly during the one-party-era (1923-1950), the CHP has not been able to adapt itself to competitive electoral politics since Turkey moved to multi-party rule in the 1950s (Today’s Zaman, December 8). Indeed, the CHP’s critical distance from the masses and their lifestyles and its modernization project of transforming Turkish society have shaped the identity of the party’s core grassroots. Therefore, even if Baykal’s intentions were sincere, many analysts like Ozipek are skeptical about the CHP’s ability to transform itself from a statist party to a liberal party embracing human rights and religious freedom.

Whether sincere or not, if Baykal's recent gamble fails in March elections, it will certainly damage his leadership of the party, leaving him vulnerable to be challenged by Haluk Koç. Key races to watch out for are the Ankara and Kocaeli mayoral races, in which CHP has nominated candidates Murat Karayalçın and Sefa Sirmen.

In other news with CHP, the party's continued vow to oppose any attempt by AKP to renew efforts to overhaul Turkey's military constitution has met with opposition from DSP (the Democratic Left Party). While DSP has not allowed women wearing the chador to enter their party, it has announced that it will not support CHP's opposition to constitutional reform, which might well allow for the substantive policy changes to which both DSP and CHP have before been opposed. It was only with the votes of DSP that CHP was allowed to challenge the headscarf amendments at the Constitutional Court. Although DSP's party has been significantly weakened over the years, the party to which Bülent Ecevit jumped has publicly declared its contention with CHP.

In relation to the Kurdish question, CHP has also revamped its policy. According to TDZ,

The Diyarbakır branch of the CHP submitted a report to the CHP headquarters and is supported by all of the 21 provincial party branches from predominantly Kurdish areas. In the report, the Diyarbakır branch suggested that the party's program first name the question the "Kurdish question" and not hesitate to use the term "Kurd." The report's other suggestions include: "The Kurdish identity should be recognized. Instead of being Turkish, being a citizen of the Turkish Republic should be emphasized. Kurdish language courses should be elective courses in primary and secondary education. Universities should open Kurdish language and literature departments. Formulas should be developed for the integration of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party [PKK] members."

. . . .

The CHP in its report on the Kurdish question in 1989 suggested cultural rights -- including education in one's mother tongue -- but was unable to implement its own recommendations.

The recent report issued by the Diyarbakır branch of the CHP also refers to the 1989 report and underlines that this report should be revised.

Kurdish citizens have a tendency to perceive the CHP as a "Turkish nationalist" party. The CHP's votes since the mid 1990s started to decline in Kurdish-populated areas. In the 2002 general elections, they were next to nothing. Baykal, during his visit to Diyarbakır this summer, faced protesters.

Sezgin Tanrıkulu, the former chairman of the Diyarbakır Bar Association, said the CHP's new initiative concerning the Kurdish question is not the talk of the town at all. He noted that the CHP has long had no influence in the region and has therefore not been able to revise its own 1989 report.

"The CHP does not represent anything in the region. This report or any initiative can only be meaningful if the party is able to establish a relationship with Kurds based on trust. For now, the CHP says one thing in Diyarbakır and the exact opposite elsewhere," Tanrıkulu underlined.

As with the chador initiative, it is completely unclear as to exactly what CHP is up to, and for good reason. Reconsidering notions of "Turkishness" seems laughable given CHP's opposition to Article 301, and its obdurate defenses of laws restricting freedom of expression. However, as I mentioned on Wednesday, it is of note that CHP is even campaigning for votes in the southeast given the unlikelihood of the party acheiving even the smallest modicum of success.

Bizarrely, Baykal recently predicted the AKP to receive over 50 percent of the vote. However, a recent MetroPoll has AKP behind, and the election seems all the more unpredictable because parties are reaching out beyond their traditional bases of support. In the end, will CHP be successful in its effort to expand its reach? If it should fail, will it again reverse itself and become even more nationalist? What will become of Baykal, whose authoritarian leadership over the party has long been questioned? If the party were to make inroads, could it sustain itself, or would its lack of a clear agenda result in fragmentation? What would any of these results mean for the future of Turkey's center-left?

More Musing About Illiberal Turkey & "Neighborhood Pressure"

Professor Binnaz Toprak of Boğaziçi University recently released the results of a survey of "neighborhood pressure" in Anatolian cities. The survey was conducted in conjunction with the Open Society Institute, and its subjects are self-identified secular university students who the research finds to experience social pressure when moving into conservative neighborhoods. The report is entitled "Being Different in Anatolia." BIA-Net quotes from Professor Toprak's conclusion of the survey's findings:

“Our finds show that overcoming the oppressive conservatism of the ruling power does not play a transforming role in making people more respectful to the rights and freedoms of the people who live in these places. On the contrary, when the process by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to put its own people in the bureaucratic positions combines with the religious-community structuring and the activities in the Anatolian cities, we think the environment that exists now causes more worries when looked from these perspectives.”

BIA-Net documents reaction to the research, which hardly eschews the political in its design, execution, or findings. "Neighborhood pressure" is a commonly cited concern of some secularists, many of whom cited the phenomenon last year as reason for their opposition to the AKP-MHP passed legislation enabling women to wear headscarves at university.

Criticism of Toprak's research includes claims that the research question is not new, and conceptually muddles "social pressure" and "intolerance" (see Emre Uslu and Önder Aytaç), forgoes meaningful explanation of the intolerance it identifies (see Şahin Alpay), and ignores intolerance, bigotry, and social pressure as dilemmas not only related to Islam, but also the values of fanatical secularism and hardcore nationalism (Alpay). The last of these criticisms are also present in this Hürriyet op/ed, which is authored by one of Toprak's former students. Appropriately, the op/ed concludes with qualified optimism:

Unfortunately, some conservative commentators, which have praised previous works by Professor Toprak, now criticize her severely and argue that the "neighborhood pressure" is imaginary. They should have done better. Because pressure is a very personal thing: only you decide whether you face it or not. By this dismissive attitude, those conservatives only mirror the lack of empathy that the secularists show when it comes to the official pressure on veiled women. That’s why we should take Dr. Toprak’s findings seriously. But we should also not exaggerate them. First of all, this is a targeted research, not a random survey. In other words, the interviewees went out to find out those specific groups that could be under neighborhood pressure. So, it does not give a full picture of the country.

In fact, there are many signs showing that Anatolia is actually less conservative today than it used to be. It is more business-oriented, its women are more integrated into society, and it is more open to the world. But perhaps it is this very dynamic which creates a tension. Maybe the clash between the secular establishment and the AKP boils down in society to the tension between the mosque community and beer hall crowd. Maybe, because of their political ascendancy, the conservatives are now more self-confident and triumphant. These are all speculations, since Dr. Toprak’s research does not tells us much about the conservative side of the picture. We would be misleading ourselves by ignoring the complexities there.

We would also be misleading ourselves by thinking that the conservatism in question comes all from religion. The survey tells us that among the "inappropriate" behaviors in Anatolia, there is not just consuming alcohol or "eating during Ramadan", but also speaking Kurdish. "Kurdish youth who are called on their cell phones in a bus by their relatives who don’t speak Turkish," the research says, "decide not to take the call". And allergy to Kurdish is not an Islamic reaction -- it is a nationalist one.The problem, then, is actually a lack of tolerance to anything that is different. And, alas, that is the problem of the whole of Turkey! Not just the religious conservatives but also the secularists are very, very, intolerant. That’s why neighborhood pressure exists everywhere, from conservative and parochial towns to secular and chic plazas. In the former, the headscarf is the demanded norm. In the latter, it is the expelled heresy.

So, you may ask, if it is such a nation of illiberals, is Turkey simply hopeless?

Not really. I think we are still making progress. In the past, one illiberal camp -- the secular Kemalists -- had dominated the whole society. Now we have two illiberal camps clashing with other. That is better, because it paves the road to pluralism. The optimistic scenario is that these two warring camps will wear themselves out, and, over time, come to a live-and-let-live consensus. And the pessimistic scenario? Well, it is that we will be trapped in this cultural civil war, for ever and ever.

The question as to whether the clash between two rather illiberal camps is capable of making Turkey a more pluralistic society is certainly one worth poring over, but politics and institutions have a long way to go until both Turkish state and society are comfortable with accommodating differences.

Women in Politics and the Türban Bugaboo

Turkey was one of the first countries to allow women to hold elected office, but out of 8,794 men who have been elected to Parliament since 1935, the year in which Turkish women first took office, only 236 women have been elected. While it is true that women now hold a near 10 percent of seats in the Turkish Grand National Assembly (though many are in DTP), only a mere 2.32 percent hold local office. Even more shockingly, only .56% of all elected mayors are women. Out of those women who are elected to Parliament, many are so beholden to the males in their respective parties that they rarely speak out on their own accord. In the cabinet, there is only one woman, Nimet Çubukçu, and she is charged with women's issues. Many of these women are dependent on a tightly-controlled political party system that systemically preserves patriarchy as well as it does the elitism and nepotism long characteristic of Turkish party politics. Women are few and far between, especially women taking progressive political positions, and as if they did not face enough challenges, over sixty percent are barred from entering the public sphere as a result of their headscarves.

According to a recent report from AKDER, preoccupation with the türban issue has not only taken the focus off improving the status of women in politics, but systematically denied a majority of Turkish women rights to political participation. As a result of the headscarf bugaboo, women have also been deprived of rights to education, employment, and economic and social security. Women who wear the headscarf are further subjected to abuse from society-at-large, in addition to the pain that comes with knowing one is not able to fulfill their potential.

Forbidding women to exercise their basic rights or barring their entrance to public places unless they take off their headscarves is clearly a form of violence. According to CEDAW, "gender based violence is violence that is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately."[65] Then again “being denied access to existing rights” is a form of violence against women. In addition, we must accept discrimination on the grounds of clothes worn on the basis of religious conviction as violence.

Women sometimes took their headscarf off just because they were “persuaded” by an employee or because they were threatened or injured physically. Sometimes they were insulted by staff or thrown out of a place and threatened with prosecution. Being turned off university campuses is a very common experience. YÖK (the Higher Education Council in Turkey , the central state body which regulates the whole of university education, including private universities, and has a reputation for applying restrictive and repressive policies) has published circulars to ensure that veiled women are not admitted into university staff’s residential quarters.[66] Women have been ejected from exam rooms because university staff did not approve of their wigs[67] and when a woman went to take her driving test, she was told “showing your hair will not damage your virtue and honour”[68] and frogmarched to the door by police.

Headscarfed women receive treatment very much like that received by black people in an apartheid society, unable to enter white people’s churches, restaurants bus stations and barred from higher education a situation which can cause real psychological trauma.[69]

Physical attack harms physical integrity, but an emotional and psychological attack damages emotional and psychological integrity. As psychiatrists might put it, the attack on the headscarf ban is an attack on personal identity for women who view the headscarf as part of their identity. The anger and frustration that headscarfed women feel at the cutting short of their future plans, the feelings of internal conflict, the strong feelings of having their path blocked when they refuse to take their headscarf off, and the feelings of guilt if they do take it off all amount to a highly destructive experience. [70]

Because wearing a headscarf is a woman’s conscious act and her own decision, the psychological damage is heightened even more. If the “uncovered head” which is being imposed in the interests of modernity were merely a matter of clothing, if the condition for entering education was to dress in green from head to foot, every woman who wanted to continue their education might have put up with such a rule even if it were against their individual preference. But the fact that the headscarf is worn for religious reasons makes the dilemma much sharper for women. The headscarf ban puts women in the position of submission to government authority, the school or the employer, choosing between wearing the headscarf or exercising her rights.

Removing a woman’s right to choose her own clothes under such circumstances is a profound external interference. Forcing a woman to either uncover her head or give up her rights is psychological violence, in the same way that forcing a woman to cover her head is psychological violence.

This is a current and ongoing violation because the ban remains in place and subjects women to constant negative feelings and thoughts. When women who choose to wear the headscarf for their own important reasons are confronted with coercive interference from the state, and not wanting to take the headscarf off are forced to do so, they suffer severe internal conflict at having to act contrary to their own choices and determinations.

The research entitled “Covered Reality of Turkey” has determined that women who had to take their headscarf off were indeed badly affected. The research found that 70.8% of women who removed their headscarf believe it damaged their personalities, and 63.2% felt insulted.[71] Consequently many women chose to stay away from education rather than take off their headscarf. But this in turn left those women feeling empty because they were not permitted to fulfill their potential.

As TDZ's Roberta Davenport gleans from the report, “If the authorities had spent one-tenth of that energy and time bringing solutions to the long list of real women’s problems, the status of women in Turkey would be much better today -- problems such as the fact that only one-quarter of women are employed and have poor access to health insurance or a pension, that more than 5 million women are illiterate, that although one in three Turkish women have been exposed to violence, that there are only 38 shelters for women in a country with 81 provinces and a population of 72 million.”

In a recent survey by the World Economic Forum, its annual Global Gender Gap Report, Turkey ranked 123rd of 130 countries analyzed --a dismal result for a country in which men and women are legally equal, and more so, a society hugely supportive and proud of its inclusion of women in the public sphere.

To rectify women's subjugation in politics, some have advocated using gender quotas to bolster the participation of women in politics. Women's groups take different positions on the use of quotas, but many, like AKDER, have supported quotas as a means of positive discrimination by which to promote the equal participation of women in politics. Prime Minister Erdoğan opposes quotas, saying that they would make women dependent on the benevolence of men. However, as others have argued, it is hard to see how this is not already the case. AKDER was particularly perturbed last month after its campaign for gender quotas won the endorsement of TÜSIAD only to be criticized by Erdoğan. For many women's rights activists, the prime minister generated further doubt of his support for women in politics when he stated in March -- and on International Women's Day -- that every Turkish woman should give birth to at least three children.

PHOTO of Emine Bozkurt, European Parliament Rapporteur on Women's Rights in Turkey

No political party has been particularly supportive of women's rights, and when women do reach political office, they either take a back seat or are used as political pawns. As Itir Bağdadi, lecturer at İzmir University of Economics, alluded to at a panel I was able to attend at this year's Middle East Studies Association (MESA) conference, women in the public sphere often behave as if they have to prove their masculinity -- often eschewing their interests as women, and perhaps going so far as to even compensate for their perceived femininity. The example Bağdadi brought up was former prime minister Tansu Çiller, who despite being rather centrist before landing in the position of prime minister, soon became a national security hawk. Çiller was Turkey's first female prime minister, and one of the first female leaders of governmet anywhere in the world. However, in Turkey, she is largely remembered as fomenting the war in the Kurdish southeast. The war deeply damaged Turkey's reputation around the world, failed to quell the PKK, and involved military/deep state tactics that systematically killed, injured, and displaced large swaths of Turkish Kurds, many of whom are still displaced today. Previous to rising to power as prime minister, Turgut Özal had been president, and his conciliatory stance on the Kurdish problem placed Turkey in the unique position of negotiating a solution -- a prospect with which Çiller was in favor when she said she favored a "Basque solution" to the problem (Zürcher). However, faced with pressure from Kemalist hardliners and what was likely a perceived exigency to prove herself "tough" on national security issues, Çiller led Turkey into a vicious political cycle from which it would not extricate itself until 1999. According to most of the women with whom I have talked, women are still very much reluctant to embrace their identities as women in the public sphere, and either resign themselves to work in a specific policy portfolio of "women's issues," or so respond to the double bind in which they are caught by abnegating their femininity.

Regardless of their weakened positions in party politics, women have become key public players. Women's groups are a critical sector of Turkey's inchoate civil society, and their strength is exemplified by the reforms these groups have helped secure. For example, in 2004, women's organizing resulted in the creation of a more progressive Turkish Penal Code. The voices of women were also harnessed in 2007 in opposition to the Turkish government's abortive attempt to change the constitution so as to characterize women as a vulnerable group in need of special protection.

Recently drawing attention to the dearth of women in politics, Emine Bozkurt, European Parliament Rapporteur on Women's Rights in Turkey, described the problem as systemic, eschewing arguments of culture and chalking women's discrimination in politics up to the political system. Bozkurt's arguments give further argument to quotas, but as AKDER acknowledges, should gender quotas become a reality, they do little for the estimated 62 percent of women denied the right to hold political office. From AKDER:

The United States Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, in a judgment in 1927 stated that “Men feared witches and burnt women.” While problems of women’s rights, modernization, human rights, and democracy are being discussed throughout the rest of the world in the 21st century, Turkey , for the last ten years, has been preoccupied with whether women with headscarves have the right to enter higher education institutions. The talk is of progress and the contemporary world, but what is actually happening is that women who wear the headscarf are being excluded from society, and while the arguments about the headscarf/türban drag on, no serious steps are being taken about women’s existing and all-too-real problems.

For more on Turkey's preoccupation with the headscarf debate and the crippling position in which it leaves women, see Feb. 19 post. If CHP is serious about its recent change of heart, it will do all it can to immediately rectify what its politics of division has done to impoverish Turkish women.

A Win for Laicism at the ECHR

From TDZ:

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that a complaint filed by two Turkish immigrants in France is not admissible, while pointing to a previous headscarf decision against Turkish national Leyla Şahin as a precedent for the ruling.

The applicants, Belgin Doğru and Esma-Nur Kervancı, are French nationals who were born in 1987 and 1986, respectively, and are living in Flers, France. As practicing Muslims, they complained about their expulsion from the school they had been attending as a result of wearing headscarves during physical education and sports classes. The two relied on European Convention on Human Rights Article 9, which covers freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and on Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 of the convention, which covers the right to an education.
The European court, however, ruled yesterday that its reasons for rejecting a similar case by Şahin set a precedent for these applicants’ complaints as well, the Anatolia news agency reported.

Şahin had to leave university in 1998 because the school prevented her from attending courses and exams when she refused to remove her headscarf. The court’s Grand Chamber ruled in 2005 that the ban did not violate the right to freedom of thought, conscience or religion guaranteed by an international human rights treaty.

The ruling was in response to an appeal by Şahin against an earlier ruling from a lower chamber of the court, which found the headscarf ban was in place to protect the rights and freedoms of all students and safeguard public order.

A law banning Islamic headscarves and other religious symbols from French state schools went into force in September 2004. Forbidden items include Muslim headscarves, Sikh turbans, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crucifixes.

The ECHR affirmed Şahin in a similar decision this June. The political context of the ruling is that the ECHR's stance on the türban does little to endear Europe in the hearts and minds of religious Turks, some of whom have tended to support Europeanization as a potentially positive force in efforts to renegotiate state secularism.

Headcarves and Provacateurs

Also in Sunday's Zaman:

Since a woman announced on a live television show that she does not like the founder of the Republic of Turkey, she has drawn the ire of many segments of society. She has been labeled a "provocateur" and accused of having been paid to utter those words.

But no one has focused on the real reason behind her dislike of Atatürk. We talked to the person behind the controversy to find out what shapes her views.
Nuray Canan Bezirgan, 31, is a mother of three and wears a headscarf. But she is also more than that. Bezirgan has been one of the few vocal opponents of a ban on wearing headscarves on university campuses that began to be implemented in 1998 in the wake of the Feb. 28 unarmed military intervention against a coalition government with the stated purpose of preventing the rise of Islamist movements. The entire country learned her identity when she appeared on a political debate show hosted by Fatih Altaylı on the Kanal 1 television station and said "I don't like Atatürk, but I like Ayatollah [Khomeini]," the leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution.

"First of all, that is not what I said," Bezirgan says, angered by the media's simplifying her point to a single phrase, which she did not utter in one sentence. She says she was invited as a guest to discuss a recent ruling of the Constitutional Court annulling a government-sponsored amendment that would have lifted the nearly two-decade-long ban on the headscarf. She was one of the guests, she said, because she had legal troubles when an anti-headscarf campaign was started after the Feb. 28 process. "In 1998, I was a second-year student at İstanbul University's Health Services Vocational College," she says. On one day, a few weeks before the graduation ceremony in June of that year, she was ordered by her instructor to leave a final exam because she was wearing a headscarf. When she refused, the instructor called the police, which were already deployed on campus as a safety measure against daily headscarf protests and journalists filming them. The police entered the classroom. She remembers them as Robocop figures and speaks of being very scared because the police came in only for her, with a horde of media members tailing them, and dragged her out. She was detained by the police and later charged with "obstructing education," eventually being expelled from school. She was released pending trial and when the trial ended in the June 2000, she was sentenced to six months in prison, a sentence later converted to a monetary fine. Many other people had similar experiences, but only a few of them spoke out.

Bezirgan said the first time she became interested in the headscarf issue was when she saw protesters like her future self when she was 14 or 15. "I didn't know anything about the headscarf or Islam back then. I remember I saw headscarved students at the Cerrahpa?a School of Medicine. I must have been there for a medical problem. I asked them what they were protesting and they told me. That was the first time I heard of such a problem in Turkey."

Her mother, with roots in the former Yugoslavia, was from the western Thrace region, where she was raised, while her father's side of the family is from the more traditional central Anatolian province of Kütahya. "I was mainly brought up with the culture of Thrace," she says. She was the first woman on her mother's side to cover her head and says she even had difficulties with her family when she adopted her religious convictions. "It really was difficult when I lived with my family," she says. But later, she moved out to a state dorm, where things became easier. While studying at the university she met her husband, 33-year-old Ömer Bezirgan, who shares a similar outlook on life.

Her first detention on the day of that final exam, however, was not her last. In February 1999 she was detained once again, along with 17 others, during a demonstration of headscarved students at Marmara University. She was four-and-a-half-months pregnant with twin boys. "I was not even part of the demonstration. I was waiting for a friend there," she recalls. When she fainted in the detention cell and was taken to the hospital she was told by the doctors that she had lost one of the babies. She spoke of this terrible memory while showing a forensic medicine report of the incident citing an in utero mort fetalis. After her release she was charged with "opposition to the law on demonstrations," of which she was acquitted at the trial's conclusion. She also remembers that male protesters were beaten by the police and humiliated by officers. At some point during her hospitalization, an officer even tried to remove her from the hospital to take her to court despite doctors' objections.

The psychological trauma of what she had been through was heavy, but she nevertheless continued to protest for her cause. In November 1999 she was detained once more by the police during another headscarf protest at Marmara University after releasing doves as part of the demonstration.

However, it was not until November 2000, when she appeared on a television program with journalist Mehmet Ali Birand on CNN Türk that she considered leaving the country. She was threatened physically during the show when a viewer called in and said: "We know where you live. We will kill your other child, too." In retrospect, she sees she had every reason to be scared. Many of those living through problems stemming from their wearing a headscarf were simply not vocal about what was going on. This, she believes, is an important reason why so many people do not understand what the big deal about the headscarf is. "Taking my headscarf off is like cutting my head off," she says, but complains there weren't too many people to explain this to others. "Most of the girls' families did not let them [appear on TV shows or make statements to explain their situation]," she suggests as an explanation of her being one of the few who are vocal about their problems in those times.

This happened at a time when international rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) had taken an interest in her plight. She and her family left Turkey, aided by HRW, which suggested trying to seek asylum in Canada. The country granted the couple asylum, deciding that they were under pressure from their government in practicing their religion.

Bezirgan and her family lived until 2006 in Canada, where she and her husband both majored in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and tourism and recreation with student loans from the Canadian government. They decided to return to Turkey, because Canada, Bezirgan says, proved to be "too liberal" to raise her children with the values she wanted to. "For example, they are too liberal on issues such as homosexual rights. At school the teacher tells children it's possible to have a family with two mothers only or two fathers. It is confusing for the children." However, Ömer Bezirgan quickly notes, "We haven't fully settled yet; we are only trying out [living in Turkey]." The family rents the house they live in and complains of financial problems as they owe more than $50,000 to the Canadian government in student loans. The family may decide to give up and move back to Canada.

Back at home now, Bezirgan is facing an investigation for saying "I don't like Atatürk" on television. Three separate prosecutors who suspect her words might be a violation of respecting the memory of Atatürk, a crime under the current penal code, have moved to prosecute her.

"There is nothing here against the personality of Atatürk. I am only discussing the opinions of this personality as well as the opinions and applications of these opinions by people citing his thoughts. They are trying to present me as if I had insulted Atatürk, the person, and that is not the case."

The Politics of Underwear

PHOTO from Milliyet: These İstanbul beachgoers are protesting new laws aimed to crack down on the bathing habits of poorer İstanbulular. Holding signs declaring that not all are able to afford nice swimsuits, they argue İstanbul's poor should not be discriminated against. After all, we all just want to swim, right?


I had not heard of this debate until today, but apparently there was much ado in the summer of 2005 concerning the swimming habits of the poorer sectors of İstanbul's population. Appalled by men swimming in their underwear and women wearing full chadors on the beach, the city's elite soon organized enough pressure to pass a municipal reform making it illegal to swim in one's underwear and requiring that women not cover their legs while taking a dip. Another matter of sartorial politics, the underwear controversy is an interesting illustration of the class conflicts between "white Turks" and "black Turks." So, despite the fact that this happened in 2005, it is an interesting complement to the recent news on the türban.

The so-called "white Turks" represent the established, most often secular elite of Turkey's old guard and have proudly adopted a cosmopolitan, European-type lifestyle. As Karl Vick's reportage in the Washington Post includes, they eat fish, not the traditional kebap. (Although, I am sure they eat plenty of kebap.) The opening pages of Orhan Pamuk's İstanbul give a wonderful description of what it means to be a "white Turk." Pamuk writes of his childhood contemplation of the sitting rooms devoted to Western culture in which he used to play as a child—their museum-like qualities and the pianos that went unplayed.

In contrast, the "black Turks" represent the rural poor who began to move into the cities as early as the 1950s and whose presence began to be viewed as a serious threat to the European-type Turkish identity as their immigration accelerated in the 1980s. They are seen as less refined by their "white Turk" counterparts and still hold tightly to the customs of the countryside they brought with them. From the article:

The flap appeared to begin with a screed that a columnist unleashed in the July 27 issue of the newspaper Radikal. Mine G. Kirikkanat, a very white Turk, began by writing about how proud she was of Istanbul's shiny international airport, which "lights up Turkey's 'non-Arab' face."

But the drive into the city, she wrote, was something else. In the parks along the shore road toward town, "men in their underwear rest ruminating, women wearing black chadors or headscarves all are fanning the barbecue. ... This view is repeated every 10 meters square, our dark people cooking meat by the sea that they turn their [behinds] toward."

"Carnivore Islamistan," the columnist dubbed the scene, capturing in a brutal phrase the major fault line of class and politics in modern Turkey.

If the kebab is the staple food of Anatolia, the white Turks native to Istanbul prefer sea bass, bluefish and other delicate catches of the two seas that bracket the city and the Bosporus Strait in between. And this, too, has caused consternation.

But while the men were branded as offensive for being undressed, their wives were deemed unsuitable for wearing the long cloaks favored by religious Muslim women. Modern Turkey, though 99 percent Muslim, was founded in 1923 as a secular republic, and was led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the dashing military hero who conceived the nation-state from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk embraced the French definition of secularism — not so much neutral toward all faiths as antagonistic toward public expressions of the dominant religion.

In Turkey, female government employees are forbidden to wear the head scarves that, despite the official line, a majority of Turkish women wear, some out of tradition, others for religious reasons. Ataturk favored tuxedos, cigarettes and pinups of models in bikinis.

"We are Ataturk's women!" shouted Mine Okcugil, 38, clasping the hand of the woman in the chaise lounge next to her at Caddebostan. Her own bikini was in danger of falling off her front. She works at the Agriculture Ministry.

"We are all modern women of the republic," said Semra Aydemir, 52, a retired teacher, also in a tiny two-piece. "We are against terrorism. We are against violence. We are against ugliness."

So it is that men and women roaming the beach in T-shirts reading "Security" keep an eye peeled not only for men wearing too little but for women wearing too much. Female beach-goers no longer are allowed to wade with their legs covered by flowing fabric.

The immigrant population represented by the "black Turks" is still struggling in its coming to terms with urban life and integration of the two groups has been quite difficult, thus giving birth to the bizarre (and racist) terminology. The difficulty is owed to poverty (European tastes are expensive), a lack of social mobility, and a resentment on the part of the "white Turks" that stifles opportunities for the kinds of social interactions between classes that would facilitate integration. This resentment is quite well-portrayed in the article and is also seen in the türban debate (see Feb. 19 post). Some of this lack of integration is also no doubt owed to the fact that these "black Turks" do not necessarily want to adopt the lifestyle of their "white Turk" counterparts.

However, this division is very much a simplification, and as is often the case in Turkish politics, it is the complication of simplifications in which meaning can be found. Take the case of Abdullah Gül who in many ways is more cultured and sophisticated than the "white Turks" who oppose him. Gül is a pious Muslim who devoutly observes Ramazan and namaz, gives money to Islamic schools and charities, and has a spouse who opts to wear the türban (although his detractors say Ms. Gül has been coerced). At the same time, he was educated in Europe, wears sharp suits, and is well-known for his business knack. Like many AKP politicians and their supporters, he represents what has been called the new Islamic middle class. This new class represents a fissue in the social order as it does not easily fit within the "white"/"black" divide. Insomuch as this fissue threatens the social order, it disturbs the "white Turks." The fissure has also generated a politics of fear that pervades Turkish politics, most significantly in regard to secularism.

Whether it is swimming in underwear or donning a türban at university, the "white Turks'" fear of losing control of the social realities with which they are accustomed and comfortable is very much the driving factor behind these odd restricitions. Already uncomfortable with difference, the "white Turks" are being pressed to find new approaches to settling the fact that not all sectors of Turkish society can or do share their tastes, values, and customs. As evidenced by the recent türban decision, the approach so far has largely been the old, reliable authoritarian one: refusal to acknowledge and/or negotiate difference. The sniveling is only likely to increase.

And, just as an aside, I have been to European beaches. . . and, yes, along with others, swam in my underwear. No one seemed to care. Why is it an issue in Turkey?