Turkey: Beginning of the End?

More background on the Turkey crisis ...

Newsweek, June 2006

The scene was sadly familiar, especially in the strife-torn Middle East. In the shadow of a great mosque, a crowd of 40,000 gathered to bury a victim of political violence—and vent their rage at the authorities. But this was not Iraq or the Palestinian territories. It was downtown Ankara. Nor were the demonstrators angry Islamist fanatics. They were judges, bureaucrats and businessmen, staunch secularists shouting out their loyalty to the state—and denouncing a government they say is taking Turkey down a dangerously Islamic path. "Turkey is secular and will remain secular," they chanted. "Turkey will not become an Iran."

The occasion was the funeral of Judge Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin, killed by a 28-year-old lawyer who opened fire recently inside Turkey's High Court. The gunman's motives are not yet clear, but the presumption of most in the crowd was that he was a militant Islamist getting revenge for a court ruling last November that upheld restrictions on the wearing of headscarves in and around public schools. "This is an attack on the secular republic," declared President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, who accused Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, of seeking to "destroy the regime" by undermining the country's strict division between mosque and state ...

Ever since he came to power in a landslide victory in 2002, Erdogan has been trying to roll back Turkey's brand of draconian secularism. His party has appointed religiously minded bureaucrats to senior positions in the Education Ministry; last year it tried (unsuccessfully) to criminalize adultery. The AKP has steadily campaigned to lift the ban on headscarves in schools, universities and government offices, though so far Turkish courts (and even the European Court of Human Rights) have rejected their plea. Most controversially, last month Bulent Arinc, the AKP speaker of Parliament, suggested the time had come to "reconsider the concept of secularism as it is practiced in Turkey"—triggering a storm of protest. Erdogan's Islamism may be mild by Middle Eastern standards, but this month's demonstrations are a clear sign that he may have gone too far. "The so-far silent secularists have now raised their voice," says Professor Nilufer Narli of Istanbul's Bahcesehir University. "This is a massive movement of people from all walks of life."

The government also tried to downplay the more overtly Islamist elements of its program. The headscarf issue is "a problem perhaps for only one and a half percent of the people," according to Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Ali Sahin, who insists that the government's priority is unemployment and the economy.

... other reforms—chiefly new laws liberalizing the country's antiquated justice system and granting new rights of free speech and religious tolerance to Turkish minorities, including his own Islamist backers ...

In a clumsy attempt to put an AKP loyalist at the helm of one of Turkey's few independent institutions, Erdogan tried to appoint the former head of a Saudi-owned Islamic bank to the post. Eventually the job went to Durmus Yilmaz, an old hand at the Central Bank. But the affair shook businessmen's confidence, and the economy's recent troubles have eroded that trust even more. "The government is paying more attention to installing its own people and following its own religious agenda," complains Mehmet Ali Ince, an importer of copying equipment in Istanbul whose business has been hit by the falling lira ...

Critics of the ruling party fear that if Erdogan were indeed to take the job, the AKP would be emboldened to push through exactly the Islamic policies they're shying away from today—such as scrapping the headscarf ban and ending government control over religious appointments and even the content of sermons.

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