Turkey must be encouraged to reject its brutal dark side
By Joan McAlpine

The Herald/UK
March 10 2005

The stampede of policemen hardly looks human. In their visors,
helmets, riot shields and body armour they resemble the robot army in
a science fiction film, with its troops fighting for The Dark Side.
A young woman is pushed to the ground. As the riot police rush past,
they cosh her repeatedly. Several kick her in the head as she struggles
to remain conscious.

This peaceful Turkish demonstration in favour of women’s rights was
smashed as if it were a bloodthirsty band of anarchists equipped
with petrol bombs. The scenes, from Istanbul this week, invariably
raise questions about whether the country is fit to join the European
Union. The EU has already expressed its shock at the “disproportionate
force” used against the demonstrators.

Membership negotiations are set to begin this October, with Britain
and Germany both keen to see the community sign up its first Muslim
partner.

The process could take some time, perhaps 10 or 15 years. Some
Europeans believe it will never happen. Turkey, they believe, is
just too different, too eastern, to embrace western concepts of human
rights and liberalism. Optimists, including our own foreign secretary,
Jack Straw, say that pluralism and tolerance are not exclusively
Judaeo-Christian values.

Turkey is the Islamic world’s first and most succesful secular
democracy. Despite the violence of police in Istanbul, it is
very different from the brutal stereotype of Alan Parker’s film
Midnight Express, where a young American is tortured and raped in
prison after attempting to smuggle cannabis out of the country. The
movie was criticised for its racism at the time of release in 1978
and appears even more dated today. Yet its portrait of Turkey as a
harsh, unreasonable and punitive place has been hard to break down,
despite the passage of years and the growth of package holidays to
the country’s idyllic southern coast.

Turks acknowledge their differences with Europeans from quite a
different perspective. Their country is more religious, with 90% of
the population observing the feast of Ramadan. The family is at the
centre of national culture. In common with other traditional societies,
they place a higher value on friendship, loyalty and honour. These,
they believe, are all positive attributes which, combined with the
economic advances in the west of their country, make them an ideal
partner. If the EU cannot deal with this difference, surely, they
conclude, it is Brussels which exhibits intolerance.

Which vision of Turkey is correct? Ankara has certainly made great
strides towards Straw’s pluralism. It abolished the death penalty
last January, which makes it a more humanitarian country than the US.
The government has signed various conventions on the protection of
minorities, the Kurdish language is no longer outlawed and the state
of emergency which gave security forces carte blanche to abuse the
inhabitants of the south-eastern region has been lifted.

The government has adopted a “zero tolerance” position on torture
and passed a law guaranteeing press freedom. A new penal code will
be introduced next month. This will considerably improve the rights
of women. Honour killings will be punishable with life imprisonment,
and rape within marriage criminalised (we should remember that the UK
only got around to that latter measure within our own generation).
The Ankara government pulled back from an attempt, last September,
to criminalise adultery within the penal code â~@~S a move presumably
intended to appease fundamentalists.

Enlightened commentators within Turkey this week suggested the police
were particularly brutal because their traditional right to behave
as they like will be severely curtailed under the new code. They
feel the wind of change and they dislike it enormously. But many
others within the country, along with human-rights organisations and
the EU itself, acknowledge the changes must be bolder. For example,
the penal code will proscribe the practice of “virginity testing”
forced on young women by their families or prospective in-laws But
this apparent advance is immediately cancelled out, because the code
w ill allow a judge to order virginity tests on young women, even
if they refuse consent. Since the law also criminalises consensual
sex between those under 17, a girl could find herself trapped and
punished by the state for what is an extremely private act, not to
say an individual human right. Since the virginity of boys cannot be
determined, the law is also entirely discriminatory. The new code
will not extend to tolerance of homosexuals, so gays can expect
continued persecution. Amnesty International says that the changes
are insufficient to tackle the widespread violence that is used to
control women within the home. Their research shows local police and
prosecutors remain reluctant to intervene in family matters.

One could go on and on. The failure to educate enough women, 19%
of whom remain illiterate. Or the lack of rights for trade unions to
organise. Or the continuing discrimination against minorities. The
electoral system demands that parties must have 10% of the entire vote
before they get representation, which excludes Kurds and Armenians
from parliament.

However, the whole point of EU membership is to encourage change. The
tempting fruits of a free trade zone stretching from Galway to beyond
the Bosphorus offer a real incentive to modernise. After all, many
members of the community have recent pasts which can only be= described
as primitive. Crimes of passion, our version of honour killings, were
regarded as perfectly acceptable in Mediterranean societies in living
memory. The Republic of Ireland was practically a theocracy until the
1970s and even today it is difficult for single women in some parts
of the country to obtain contraceptives. On the subject of Ireland,
Britain’s human-rights record in the north was hardly exemplary when
Ted Heath signed up for the Common Market, as it was called back
in the early 1970s. We cannot even call ourselves a paragon today,
with a government recently forced to abandon detention without trial,
only to replace it with a who-knows-what mess? Meanwhile, we fawn
over an American administration which most certainly does not have
a zero-tolerance approach to torture.

This is not let Ankara off the hook. I would still prefer to raise
a daughter in central Scotland than Kurdistan. Judged in the global
and historical context, however, the nation which gave the world
the splendour of the Ottoman era and the civilised rationalism of
Ataturk deserves a chance. Turkey has loads of catching up to do.
Let’s hope it makes it, for all our sakes.

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