Toronto Star, Canada
May 6 2007

Moment of truth for Turkey – and the West

Autocratic secularists are trying to pull Turkey back from reforms
made since 2002 election

May 06, 2007 04:30 AM
Haroon Siddiqui

Monitoring the clash between Turkish secularists and Islamists, my
mind kept drifting back to three enriching encounters with Turkish
Canadians in recent weeks:

On Feb. 10, Turkey was the topic of Glendon College’s 12th annual
International Studies Symposium. The speakers, including scholars
from Turkey, differed in both our analysis and prognosis. But we did
so in a civilized way, unlike what’s happening in Turkey now.

On March 24, the Toronto Centre for the Arts was packed for a rare
Canadian concert by the legendary Turkish singer Ahmet Özhan. A
former pop star, he has devoted himself to classical Sufi music. That
night he sang mostly the mystical poetry of Rumi (on whose 800th
anniversary this year, UNESCO has declared 2007 as the International
Year of Rumi).

His North York audience was an eclectic mix of races, cultures and
ethnicities and included Turkish Canadian women in the hijab as well
as miniskirts.

On April 22, a sunny spring Sunday, I had lunch in
Niagara-on-the-Lake on the riverside property of Fuad Sahin, a
retired urologist and a pioneer Turkish immigrant to Canada, who came
here in 1958 as a student.
When I phoned him Thursday to ask him about developments in his
native land, he offered this clinical analysis:

"Just as the Republicans never really accepted Bill Clinton as
president, the secularists in Turkey never really accepted Tayyip
Erdogan as prime minister. They have been barking, right and left,
for five years.

"Now they are in a panic."

Secularists – the military-led minority elite of judges,
nationalists, doctrinaire academics and old-style politicians – are
concerned about Erdogan being "Islamic."

But they are far more worried about losing the power they have held
for decades. They are the self-anointed guardians of the secularist
legacy of Kemal Ataturk, the modernizer who came to power after the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1923.

Theirs is a fundamentalist secularism, fervently anti-religious, more
precisely, anti-Islamic (which is partly why it is admired by some in
the West).

It is also autocratic, in the mould of the old Communist regimes
keeping religion in check.

Turkish women are not allowed to wear the hijab in government
buildings or universities, forcing many to avoid higher education,
civil service and politics. Hijabi lawyers can’t appear in court,
forcing them to give cases to their male colleagues.

The military also dismisses elected governments on the vague charge
of being Islamic.

It was in this discriminatory milieu that Erdogan’s Justice and
Development Party, an Islamic grassroots organization, won two-thirds
of parliamentary seats in the 2002 elections.

He promised to keep state and religion apart. But for minor missteps,
he has.

He has also done something else.

Following International Monetary Fund policies, he has doubled the
GDP, attracted record foreign investment, and helped drive both the
currency and the stock markets to unprecedented levels. He has
brought up a whole new middle class, much the way Margaret Thatcher
did in Britain.

Economic liberation is spawning social liberation and religious
moderation. Madrassahs are introducing English and the sciences.
Women entrepreneurs are being encouraged.

Erdogan also undertook political and social reforms, including
improving Turkey’s wretched human rights record, especially toward
the minority Kurds, to the point that the European Union began
negotiations for Turkey’s membership.

But when Erdogan last month nominated Abdullah Gul, his urbane
foreign minister, as a candidate for the presidency, the secularists
ganged up against Gul, saying he has "a hidden Islamic agenda," proof
being that his wife wears the hijab.

The real reason is that the presidency is among the last legitimate
bastions of secularist power, with the right to appoint the army
chief of staff, judges, university deans, etc.

So the secularists deprived Gul of the needed two-thirds
parliamentary majority, as is their right, but then the courts
dismissed that first round of voting as invalid, and the army warned
it might intervene.

Instead of caving in, Erdogan has called their bluff. He has called
an early general election and also proposed that the president be
elected by the people.

The secularists are not the good guys here, as we might assume. They
are anti-market reform, anti-human rights reforms, anti-free speech,
anti-Europe and pro-nationalistic.

These are the people who hound writers, including Nobel Laureate
Orhan Pamuk, on charges of "insulting Turkishness."

It is the nationalists who are most likely behind the killing of an
Armenian editor as also three Christians last month and an Italian
priest last year.

The European Union is right to have welcomed early elections and
asserted the primacy of civilian control over the army.

Canada should as well, at this critical juncture when Turkey’s moment
of truth is at hand.

Haroon Siddiqui, the Star’s editorial page editor emeritus, appears
Thursday and Sunday. hsiddiq@thestar.ca