Page 2 of 2 'A bullet at the heart of
democracy' By Dilip Hiro
incompatible. In Turkey, it was the
secular elite, backing military coups against
Islamists, that failed the test of democracy.
Five senior generals tried to forestall
Erbakan's premiership. In early 1996, as he was
trying to form a coalition government, defense
sources leaked the contents of a secret
military-cooperation agreement Turkey had signed
with Israel a decade earlier. The generals figured
that such a revelation would so
embarrass Erbakan, and
alienate him from his Islamist base, that he would
abandon his prime-ministerial ambitions. But to
their chagrin, he persisted.
As it had
done in 1960, 1971 and 1980, the military
hierarchy seriously considered staging a coup. Yet
it could not overlook the drastically changed
international scene after the collapse of the
Soviet Union.
In earlier years, in the
midst of the Cold War, Washington had looked the
other way when the Turkish generals sent tanks
into city squares and arrested all politicians.
Now, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
on the verge of opening its doors to Poland,
Hungary, and the Czech Republic, the US
administration of president Bill Clinton was
emphasizing the importance of civilian control
over the armed forces to their leaders. A coup by
the Turkish generals in such circumstances would
have made a mockery of this freshly stressed NATO
principle.
To leave nothing to chance,
however, after several private warnings to the
Turkish generals, Clinton's secretary of state
Madeleine Albright publicly urged them "not to
exceed the armed forces' authority within the
democratic system". (In the current crisis, an
equivalent role was played by Olli Rehn, the EU's
commissioner for enlargement, who warned the
military to stop meddling in the presidential
poll. Were the generals to seize power in Ankara,
he indicated, it would destroy Turkey's chance of
becoming an EU member.)
Instead, the
Turkish generals orchestrated a war of attrition
against Erbakan by briefing the judiciary, the
media, and business people on the evils of Islamic
fundamentalism, while pursuing their own regional
foreign policy centered on forging a military
alliance with Israel. The generals' offensive came
on the heels of high inflation and unemployment as
well as a chronic Kurdish insurgency that Erbakan
had inherited. He resigned in June 1997.
Thus the generals achieved their aim by
mounting a "soft" coup, a novel strategy.
Seven months later, the Constitutional
Court banned Erbakan's party and barred him from
public life. Yet Islamists remained a political
force committed to parliamentary democracy.
Erbakan managed to play an important role in
creating the Virtue Party, which emerged as the
main opposition party in the 1999 general
election. Not for long, though.
In June
2001, the Constitutional Court outlawed the Virtue
Party, describing it as "a focal point of
anti-secular activities" - which meant being at
the center of protests against a ban on the
wearing of women's headscarves in government
offices and educational institutions.
Head-scarf politics Over the
past decade, the battle between secularists and
Islamists has become focused on the symbolic
politics surrounding the headscarf, which almost
invariably is worn in public together with a long
coat. The two garments constitute modest dress for
women according to pious Muslims. In Islam, the
importance of women donning such dress is
attributed to a verse in the Koran that enjoins
believing women to "cast their veils over their
bosoms, and reveal not their adornment
(zinah), except to their husbands" and
other blood-related males, as well as female
relatives, and children.
In 1998, the
Turkish authorities extended the headscarf ban to
universities. Protests in response lasted two
years. The issue reached a fever pitch in May 1999
when Merve Kavakci - a US-trained computer
engineer and newly elected Virtue Party member of
Parliament, holding a dual nationality - appeared
there in a headscarf.
She argued that
nothing in the statute books barred her from doing
so. When it was discovered that she had not
secured permission from the authorities to contest
a parliamentary seat - as someone with a dual
nationality is required to do - she was quickly
deprived of her Turkish citizenship.
Her
case illustrates the difference between secularism
as practiced in Turkey and in the United States.
The US version guarantees individual religious
rights, whereas the Turkish version invests the
state with the power to suppress religious
practices in any way it wishes.
With the
general election due on July 22, secularists are
trying to push the headscarf issue to the top of
their campaign. It is easier and more effective
for them to stress that Gul's wife, Hayrunisa,
wears a headscarf than to remind the public that
he was a member of Islamist Erbakan's government a
decade earlier.
"People think that if the
first lady wears a headscarf, then many things
will change, threatening the whole secular system,
forcing all women to wear headscarves," said
Nilufer Naril, a sociology professor in Istanbul.
She seemed oblivious to the finding of the Turkish
Economic and Social Studies Foundation that nearly
two-thirds of women in Turkey already wear a
headscarf.
By contrast, the AKP is set to
contest the upcoming election on its record of
providing a strong, incorrupt government that has
produced impressive economic growth and
implemented political reform. In desperation,
leaders of the RPP, the only secular group
represented in Parliament, has decided to coalesce
with a smaller secularist faction to mount a
strong challenge to the formidable AKP.
As
yet, though, neither secularist party is showing
any sign of abandoning its present strategy of
building its program around its distrust of the
AKP and Erdogan. But then, negative thinking seems
to have inspired the early proponents of
secularism in Turkey too.
"Influenced by
the European anti-religious movements of the late
19th and early 20th centuries, the Turkish
secularist elite views religion as a pre-modern
myth, one that must be extinguished for modernity
to blossom," noted Mustafa Akyol, deputy editor of
the Turkish Daily News. "The outcome of this
mindset is an authoritarian strategy: political
power is to remain in the hands of the secularist
elite. Thus the 'secular republic' equals the
'republic of seculars' - not the republic of all
citizens."
Little wonder that secular
fundamentalists in Turkey get along famously with
the military.
Dilip Hiro is the
author of many books on the Middle East and
Central Asia. His most recent book is Blood of
the Earth: The Battle for the World's Vanishing
Oil Resources (Nation Books).
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