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TURKISH VOTERS FACE CHOICE OF TRADITIONS, ELECTION ON SUNDAY PITS A SECULAR ELITE AGAINST A MUSLIM MAJORITY FOR CHANGE
by Sabrina Tavernise - The New York Times Media Group
The International Herald Tribune, France
July 18, 2007 Wednesday
For 84 years, modern Turkey has been defined by a holy trinity -
the army, the republic and its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Each
was linked inextricably to the others and all were beyond reproach.
But a deep transformation is under way in this nation of 70 million
and elections on Sunday may prove a watershed: Secular liberal Turks,
once the principal political supporters of the nation's ruling elite,
are turning their backs on it and pledging their votes to religious
politicians as well as a new array of independents.
They say they are fed up with attempts by the elite to divide Turks on
the basis of religion and that Turkey, a predominantly Muslim democracy
with a rapidly growing economy, needs to relax its controlling approach
toward its own citizens in order to become a modern democracy.
"This election is a power struggle between those who want change and
those who don't," said Zafar Uskul, a prominent constitutional lawyer
and human rights advocate who is running with Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan's Islamic-inspired party in southern Turkey.
"Religion is just an excuse."
"In 50 years, people will write that this was the time Turkey
started to come to terms with its own people," added Suat Kinikli,
a Canadian-educated foreign policy expert and one of about 20 secular
Turks who recently joined Erdogan's party as it tried to appeal to
secular Turkish society.
The real threat to Turkish democracy, Kinikli and others argue, comes
not from Islamic fundamentalism, but from political meddling by the
military. Commanders have deposed elected governments four times
in Turkey's history and threatened a fifth in April, precipitating
elections.
Now, as the election approaches, unleashing a power struggle between
the nation's secular elite and a group of religious politicians who
draw their support from Turkey's lower and middle classes, a vocal
new civil society may just tip the balance, and help offset the danger
of rising nationalism.
"You heat water to 99 degrees and it's still water," said Baskin Oran,
a political science professor running as an independent candidate in
Istanbul. "You heat it one more degree and it's not water anymore. This
one degree is the year 2007."
The current shift has its roots in the dual nature of Turkish
democracy. From its beginnings in the 1940s, a powerful chain
of bureaucrats, judges and army generals from the secular upper
classes have controlled the most sensitive affairs, while the elected
government - now held by Erdogan's Justice and Development party -
manages more mundane aspects, much like a municipality.
But society has changed dramatically in recent decades, with religious
Turks gaining wealth and status and moving into public view. Women
in head scarves - a sight that Ataturk meant to ban from public
buildings - are in shopping malls, on motor scooters and behind the
wheels of cars.
"This narrow shirt of secularism has become a little too tight and
choking for Turkish society," said Volkan Altay, of the Turkish
Economic and Social Studies Foundation, a prominent think tank.
Ilhan Dogus, a member of the Young Civilians, an association that
opposes the military's role in politics, said mischievously that women
in head scarves are more likely than their secular counterparts to know
that Marx refers to a German philosopher, not the British department
store Marks and Spencer.
The state elite "wanted society to fit their theory," said Recep
Senturk, a research fellow at the Center for Islamic Studies in
Istanbul. "If religion doesn't disappear, we'll make it disappear
because our theory says so."
Liberals like Uskul are pioneers in joining political forces with
Erdogan's party, known by its Turkish initials, AK, which many secular
Turks consider to be too Islamic.
In Tarsus, an upper-middle-class town in southern Turkey that has
supported secular parties, Uskul, 63, was talking to lawyers Wednesday,
asking for their vote.
"Some of you might be asking, 'What is he doing in the AK party?' "
he said at the Tarsus Bar Association, peering earnestly through
rimless glasses and clasping his hands humbly between his knees.
"There was no other party to do what I wanted to do in Parliament.
The people who should be defending democracy are holding on to
military coups."
A woman in a black T-shirt shot back: "I wonder whether you still
have worries about AK as a threat to secularism." He replied: "My
wife has no concerns. Nor does my daughter, and you shouldn't either."
The portion of Turkish society hanging onto the old order is shrinking,
Altay asserts, so when more than a million Turks gathered this spring
to protest what they said was creeping Islamism, bizarre combinations
were on display. People wore masks of Ataturk, who died more than 50
years ago. The music that played was from the 1930s.
"They have calcified," Oran said.
Oran estimates that parties representing that old order will get
about a quarter of the vote, largely thanks to a campaign of fear
that plays on secularism. An ad last week in Cumhuriyet, a staunchly
pro-state daily, showed a black ballot box and a woman's eyes behind
the rectangular cut-out, evoking a facial veil. "Are you aware of
what is coming?"
Before the presidential election this spring, a television ad flashed
the years 1881 and 2007 on a black screen: The year of Ataturk's
birth and the year his secular reforms died.
The campaign was a final straw for Turkish liberals, why say that
it distracts from Turkey's real problems: relations with Kurds and
Armenians, differences over the island of Cyprus and European Union
membership.
A dangerous offshoot is nationalists, who play on poorer Turks' fears
by warning that the European Union wants to tear Turkey apart. The
main nationalist party appears set to win enough votes to make it
into Parliament, supported by poorer Turks, overwhelmed by the sharp
changes in the country over the past five years.
Liberals have responded to the campaign with wit, appealing to
everybody in Turkey's complex political landscape.
When a liberal newspaper asked for a response to the ads, Ferhat
Tumer, a 32-year-old advertising director, and his colleagues began
to brainstorm.
The result was a bubble-gum-colored two-minute cartoon in the style of
a late-night American television ad that only two Turkish television
channels were willing to air but that became a cult favorite overnight
on the Internet.
"Is thinking a crime? Speech not allowed? Is your society excluding
you, or forcing you to take sides?" the salesman-style voiceover asks
in staccato Turkish. "Move away from fragile systems that are easily
toppled. Original Democracy, adhered to by millions around the world,
is now available in Turkey!"
The short would probably not have been possible five years ago,
although Tumer and three of his colleagues had first proposed a much
more confrontational version that was a direct dig at the military.
The newspaper, Radikal, although brave, was not foolhardy.
"We believe there is a hidden group of people in Turkey who are
bored by this talk," said Tumer, fiddling with a green yo-yo at a
glass table. "We know you're not afraid of this scarf. When she takes
it off, she still has the same ideas."
"This paranoia, this tension, for the young generation, it's just
old-fashioned," he said.
Dogus's group, the Young Civilians, made posters of a fictitious
presidential candidate who combines all the qualities most despised
by the elite: a Kurdish-Armenian woman in a head scarf.
Inherent in Turkey's progress was a strange contradiction. The state
excluded religion from public life, and looked down upon religious
Turks as backward, yet when they became more integrated in public life,
condemned them as enemies of the state.
"Secular urban forces headed by the army look at these people as if
they were aliens from outer space," said Dogu Ergil, a sociology
professor at Ankara University. "But they are the products of the
very regime that left them out."
As Turkey moves ahead, it will have to grapple with where Islam
fits in the building of an equitable society. But the argument,
liberals contend, will not be over whether Islam should be part of
the government, but instead over what type of secularism fits best.
Uskul argues that Turkey's bid for European Union membership, pushed by
Erdogan's AK party, has set it on a course of democracy that virtually
guarantees secularism.
"The AK party is Turkey's reality," he said, chewing a cracker at a
kebab restaurant. "Turks have to accept it. But it should proceed by
showing it's not a threat to Turkey. I am an example of its willingness
to reform."
by Sabrina Tavernise - The New York Times Media Group
The International Herald Tribune, France
July 18, 2007 Wednesday
For 84 years, modern Turkey has been defined by a holy trinity -
the army, the republic and its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Each
was linked inextricably to the others and all were beyond reproach.
But a deep transformation is under way in this nation of 70 million
and elections on Sunday may prove a watershed: Secular liberal Turks,
once the principal political supporters of the nation's ruling elite,
are turning their backs on it and pledging their votes to religious
politicians as well as a new array of independents.
They say they are fed up with attempts by the elite to divide Turks on
the basis of religion and that Turkey, a predominantly Muslim democracy
with a rapidly growing economy, needs to relax its controlling approach
toward its own citizens in order to become a modern democracy.
"This election is a power struggle between those who want change and
those who don't," said Zafar Uskul, a prominent constitutional lawyer
and human rights advocate who is running with Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan's Islamic-inspired party in southern Turkey.
"Religion is just an excuse."
"In 50 years, people will write that this was the time Turkey
started to come to terms with its own people," added Suat Kinikli,
a Canadian-educated foreign policy expert and one of about 20 secular
Turks who recently joined Erdogan's party as it tried to appeal to
secular Turkish society.
The real threat to Turkish democracy, Kinikli and others argue, comes
not from Islamic fundamentalism, but from political meddling by the
military. Commanders have deposed elected governments four times
in Turkey's history and threatened a fifth in April, precipitating
elections.
Now, as the election approaches, unleashing a power struggle between
the nation's secular elite and a group of religious politicians who
draw their support from Turkey's lower and middle classes, a vocal
new civil society may just tip the balance, and help offset the danger
of rising nationalism.
"You heat water to 99 degrees and it's still water," said Baskin Oran,
a political science professor running as an independent candidate in
Istanbul. "You heat it one more degree and it's not water anymore. This
one degree is the year 2007."
The current shift has its roots in the dual nature of Turkish
democracy. From its beginnings in the 1940s, a powerful chain
of bureaucrats, judges and army generals from the secular upper
classes have controlled the most sensitive affairs, while the elected
government - now held by Erdogan's Justice and Development party -
manages more mundane aspects, much like a municipality.
But society has changed dramatically in recent decades, with religious
Turks gaining wealth and status and moving into public view. Women
in head scarves - a sight that Ataturk meant to ban from public
buildings - are in shopping malls, on motor scooters and behind the
wheels of cars.
"This narrow shirt of secularism has become a little too tight and
choking for Turkish society," said Volkan Altay, of the Turkish
Economic and Social Studies Foundation, a prominent think tank.
Ilhan Dogus, a member of the Young Civilians, an association that
opposes the military's role in politics, said mischievously that women
in head scarves are more likely than their secular counterparts to know
that Marx refers to a German philosopher, not the British department
store Marks and Spencer.
The state elite "wanted society to fit their theory," said Recep
Senturk, a research fellow at the Center for Islamic Studies in
Istanbul. "If religion doesn't disappear, we'll make it disappear
because our theory says so."
Liberals like Uskul are pioneers in joining political forces with
Erdogan's party, known by its Turkish initials, AK, which many secular
Turks consider to be too Islamic.
In Tarsus, an upper-middle-class town in southern Turkey that has
supported secular parties, Uskul, 63, was talking to lawyers Wednesday,
asking for their vote.
"Some of you might be asking, 'What is he doing in the AK party?' "
he said at the Tarsus Bar Association, peering earnestly through
rimless glasses and clasping his hands humbly between his knees.
"There was no other party to do what I wanted to do in Parliament.
The people who should be defending democracy are holding on to
military coups."
A woman in a black T-shirt shot back: "I wonder whether you still
have worries about AK as a threat to secularism." He replied: "My
wife has no concerns. Nor does my daughter, and you shouldn't either."
The portion of Turkish society hanging onto the old order is shrinking,
Altay asserts, so when more than a million Turks gathered this spring
to protest what they said was creeping Islamism, bizarre combinations
were on display. People wore masks of Ataturk, who died more than 50
years ago. The music that played was from the 1930s.
"They have calcified," Oran said.
Oran estimates that parties representing that old order will get
about a quarter of the vote, largely thanks to a campaign of fear
that plays on secularism. An ad last week in Cumhuriyet, a staunchly
pro-state daily, showed a black ballot box and a woman's eyes behind
the rectangular cut-out, evoking a facial veil. "Are you aware of
what is coming?"
Before the presidential election this spring, a television ad flashed
the years 1881 and 2007 on a black screen: The year of Ataturk's
birth and the year his secular reforms died.
The campaign was a final straw for Turkish liberals, why say that
it distracts from Turkey's real problems: relations with Kurds and
Armenians, differences over the island of Cyprus and European Union
membership.
A dangerous offshoot is nationalists, who play on poorer Turks' fears
by warning that the European Union wants to tear Turkey apart. The
main nationalist party appears set to win enough votes to make it
into Parliament, supported by poorer Turks, overwhelmed by the sharp
changes in the country over the past five years.
Liberals have responded to the campaign with wit, appealing to
everybody in Turkey's complex political landscape.
When a liberal newspaper asked for a response to the ads, Ferhat
Tumer, a 32-year-old advertising director, and his colleagues began
to brainstorm.
The result was a bubble-gum-colored two-minute cartoon in the style of
a late-night American television ad that only two Turkish television
channels were willing to air but that became a cult favorite overnight
on the Internet.
"Is thinking a crime? Speech not allowed? Is your society excluding
you, or forcing you to take sides?" the salesman-style voiceover asks
in staccato Turkish. "Move away from fragile systems that are easily
toppled. Original Democracy, adhered to by millions around the world,
is now available in Turkey!"
The short would probably not have been possible five years ago,
although Tumer and three of his colleagues had first proposed a much
more confrontational version that was a direct dig at the military.
The newspaper, Radikal, although brave, was not foolhardy.
"We believe there is a hidden group of people in Turkey who are
bored by this talk," said Tumer, fiddling with a green yo-yo at a
glass table. "We know you're not afraid of this scarf. When she takes
it off, she still has the same ideas."
"This paranoia, this tension, for the young generation, it's just
old-fashioned," he said.
Dogus's group, the Young Civilians, made posters of a fictitious
presidential candidate who combines all the qualities most despised
by the elite: a Kurdish-Armenian woman in a head scarf.
Inherent in Turkey's progress was a strange contradiction. The state
excluded religion from public life, and looked down upon religious
Turks as backward, yet when they became more integrated in public life,
condemned them as enemies of the state.
"Secular urban forces headed by the army look at these people as if
they were aliens from outer space," said Dogu Ergil, a sociology
professor at Ankara University. "But they are the products of the
very regime that left them out."
As Turkey moves ahead, it will have to grapple with where Islam
fits in the building of an equitable society. But the argument,
liberals contend, will not be over whether Islam should be part of
the government, but instead over what type of secularism fits best.
Uskul argues that Turkey's bid for European Union membership, pushed by
Erdogan's AK party, has set it on a course of democracy that virtually
guarantees secularism.
"The AK party is Turkey's reality," he said, chewing a cracker at a
kebab restaurant. "Turks have to accept it. But it should proceed by
showing it's not a threat to Turkey. I am an example of its willingness
to reform."