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  • AKP Prepares To Announce New Constitution

    AKP PREPARES TO ANNOUNCE NEW CONSTITUTION
    By Gareth Jenkins

    Eurasia Daily Monitor, DC
    Jan 7 2008

    Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is finally expected
    to announce details of a new Turkish constitution later this month. A
    provisional draft has been submitted to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
    Erdogan for his approval prior to it being made public. The current
    expectation is that, following its publication, the new constitution
    will be formally promulgated this spring.

    The new constitution was originally due to have been announced in
    fall 2007. However, publication was postponed after copies of the
    draft leaked to the Turkish press suggested that the new constitution
    would explicitly guarantee that women wearing Islamic headscarves
    would be able to attend university (see EDM, September 20, 2007). The
    Islamic headscarf is currently banned in all state institutions, which
    affects not only university students and academic staff but also all
    civil servants and employees in state-controlled institutions such
    as hospitals and courts of law. For hard-line Turkish secularists
    the Islamic headscarf is an expression not of personal piety but of
    a desire to regulate the public space according to the precepts of
    Islamic law, and thus is an assault on the principle of secularism
    enshrined in the current Turkish constitution. However, recent opinion
    polls suggest that nearly 70% of Turkish women cover their heads
    (see EDM, December 3, 2007), with the figure rising to over 80%
    among the poorer sections of society who form the AKP's grassroots
    support. Under the current laws, none of these women can work in the
    state sector or attend university unless they remove their headscarves.

    In late November 2007, Erdogan announced that a draft constitution
    would be made public by December 15, 2007 (see EDM, November 27).

    However, publication was again postponed. The AKP has been heavily
    criticized for the secrecy with which it has been preparing the
    new constitution. Last fall 83 leading Turkish NGOs established the
    Constitutional Platform Initiative (APG) to serve as a platform for
    a public debate about the possible contents of a new constitution.

    However, the AKP refuses to include anyone from outside a small coterie
    of its own experts in the drafting of the constitution (Yeni Asya,
    January 3, Referans, January 4).

    On January 3, the Islamist daily Zaman, which is run by followers of
    the Islamic preacher Fetullah Gulen, who is currently in self-imposed
    exile in the United States, published details of what it described
    as the draft of the constitution that will be announced later this
    month. In recent years, the Gulen movement has established a very close
    working relationship with the AKP (see EDM, November 21) and actively
    campaigned for the party in the July 22, 2007, general election.

    According to the report in Zaman, the new constitution consists of
    137 articles and seven temporary articles. It includes an explicit
    commitment to the principle of secularism enshrined in the current
    constitution. However, Article 45 of the draft states that no one
    can be deprived of a higher education on the grounds of his or her
    choice of dress. In practice, this would make it unconstitutional to
    prevent women wearing Islamic headscarves from attending university,
    although girls could still be banned from covering their heads in
    primary and secondary schools.

    The draft also curtails some of the prerogatives of the Turkish
    president. Under the current constitution, the president is responsible
    for appointing all bureaucrats. Under the draft leaked to Zaman, the
    president would only be responsible for appointing regional governors
    and ambassadors. The right to appoint all other bureaucrats would be
    transferred to the government.

    Zaman reports that Article 32 of the new constitution would require
    the courts to provide translators for defendants unable to understand
    Turkish. In practice, this would breach the current de facto ban on
    the use of Kurdish in the courtroom, as many poorer members of the
    Turkey's Kurdish minority have only a rudimentary grasp of Turkish.

    Zaman also claims that Article 66 of the constitution will redefine
    the notion of Turkishness. The current constitution describes every
    Turkish citizen as a Turk. Zaman reports that this will be now be
    revised to read that every Turkish citizen will "be called a Turk
    regardless of religion or race" (Zaman, January 3).

    Such a minor adjustment is unlikely to satisfy those Kurdish
    nationalists who want to see the new constitution include an
    explicit reference to their being allowed to express their own
    identity. The current constitution already includes provisions
    forbidding discrimination on the basis of religion. But Muslim Turks
    have long referred to members of the country's non-Muslim minorities
    as "Turkish citizens of Greek/Armenian/Jewish origin" rather than
    simply as "Turks." There is little prospect that the wording of the
    new constitution will eradicate this de facto discrimination.

    However, once the new constitution is published, the key issue is
    likely to be whether or not the AKP will retain the provisions in the
    current draft lifting the headscarf ban in universities. In spring
    2007, the fact that Abdullah Gul's wife wore a headscarf was the main
    reason for the largest public demonstrations in Turkish history, as
    hundreds of thousands of secularists took to the streets to protest
    the AKP's attempts to appoint him as the country's next president.

    Demoralized by the AKP's landslide election victory in July 2007,
    the secularists remained silent as Gul was eventually appointed to
    the presidency in August 2007. But, even if they do not take to the
    streets, there is little doubt that the inclusion of a clause in the
    new constitution outlawing the headscarf ban would further alienate
    secularists from the AKP government. It would also increase the
    pressure on the staunchly secularist Turkish military, which has
    long opposed any lifting the headscarf ban. Since its attempts in
    spring 2007 to galvanize public opposition to Gul's presidency ended
    in failure, the Turkish military has avoided any public confrontation
    with the AKP. But if the AKP includes a clause lifting the headscarf
    ban in the new constitution, it will be very difficult for the Turkish
    military to remain silent.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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