...And Still Not in the EU, Not Even Close
(written for Strangeland magazine)
A celebrated inspiration for some of the world's most precious cliches, Istanbul is renowned as the place where East meets West meets Europe meets Asia meets Muslim meets Christian meets kebab meets burger meets miniskirt meets headscarf meets some other portentous symbol diametrically opposed to some other semiotic exaggeration to create yet another banally juxtaposed, superficially thought-provoking, unity-through-contradiction catchphrase.
It’s all very daedal as chewing gum for tour guides soothing nervous visitors and baling twine for hung-over travel writers on deadline. But those same clichés become comic in their inaccuracy and grotesque in their whitewashing of reality after an extended stay in this “Meeting Point of Civilizations.” That’s how the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism would like everyone to think of the country. We Turks are very eager to erase any Midnight Express associations lingering in the minds of foreigners. Just click or surf over to CNN or BBC to drink in commercials that portray Turkey as the epitome of tolerance, concord, and diversity. You’ll see handsome moustached dervishes and sloe-eyed beauty queens spinning and floating, respectively, across Istanbul’s famous dome-and-minaret-crowded skyline, lush images filigreed with sensually spiritual quotes from our famous Sufi poets. The message: we have cool old stuff that you can’t find anywhere else and our own version of the cool new stuff. The subtext: please don’t be scared to visit, Mr. and Mrs. Hard Currency.
Turkey presents itself as the planet’s only democratic secular Muslim country, aggressively tilted to the West by our revered national hero Kemal Atatürk after the dissolution of the sumptuous silken dreamscape that was the Ottoman Empire. We’ve done away with our autocratic sultans and toothless caliphate, but we’ve retained the bejeweled palaces and the mournful call of the muezzin. We’ve managed this trick for more than eighty years thanks to state restrictions on religion applied under the vigilant watch of a military always ready to step in and run the show (three coups, in 1960, 1971, and 1980) when the civvies are deemed inadequate to the task of keeping the Islamic genie stopped up tight in the mosques.
So don’t confuse our secular boasting with U.S.- style separation of church and state. There’s a Religious Affairs Directorate originally established by Atatürk to remove what were deemed to be unseemly non-modern displays of religion from public life. The long-standing prohibition on women wearing headscarves in public schools and government buildings is the most notorious, controversial, and widespread example of this policy. Same as in the West, the idea was that our religion be heard (your tolling church bells to our quavering sing-song of God-is-great five times a day) but not seen. It’s basically the French model and it has a fancy French name: Laïcité, which turns out to be as hard to spell as it is to apply. The state is required to safeguard religious freedom but also charged with actively preventing religion from taking a conspicuous part in public life and government... which necessarily requires a curtailing of religious freedom. That would be fine except for the small demographic detail that, unlike in laique France, 99% of us Turks are Muslim, and most of us identify ourselves as such when asked, as our censuses often do.
Secularism? Yes, God willing!
So freedom of religion? Sort of... And as for secular, well, the current ruling party, the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, is still seen as an Islamist party in all but name. It came to power in 2007 campaigning hard on the promise to overturn the headscarf ban. They haven’t quite managed it, but they adamantly defend compulsory religion classes (a.k.a. “How to be a good Sunni Muslim”) in all public schools. There’s a prohibition on the consumption of alcohol in all government-run social facilities in AKP-administered municipalities, and talk of rusticating all alcohol-serving establishments to “Red Zones” on the outskirts of towns and cities.
This hasn’t yet stopped most Turks from enjoying the national tipple, raki, or the ubiquitous Efes beer. But vigilantism is on the rise. It’s most often seen in the form of passive-aggressive “neighborhood pressure (mahalle baskisi),” whereby those who are deemed to have an un-virtuous (read un-Islamic) lifestyle (i.e. alcohol drinkers, girls who don’t cover their heads, girls with boyfriends, etc.) are bullied and harassed by a network of housewives, shopkeepers, and municipal officials who use gossip, rumors, and dirty glances to ostracize “undesirables.” Foreign journalists miss this phenomenon because it’s subtle and very local. But the pressure can also take extreme and violent forms, viz. the (Alevi) shopkeeper who was beaten to a pulp last year by (Sunni) municipal patrolmen for selling alcohol after the prescribed hours, or the mob that attacked and beat a couple flirting on a public bench. Both incidents occurred in suburbs of Ankara controlled by the AKP, in one of which there is a giant billboard that proclaims “Alcohol is the Mother of all Evil.”
The AKP portrays its political agenda as reforms meant to “expand freedoms,” primarily the freedom for women to wear headscarves in universities and government buildings, which to non-religious Turks like me sounds a lot like the “freedom” for women to be considered first and foremost as sex objects who must hide their alluring bits so as not to incite impure thoughts and acts in men. Then there is the “freedom” to teach creationism in public schools, something that the former Minister of Education, Hüseyin Çelik, defended adding to the official curriculum based on the argument that a majority of the Turkish population (75% according to polls) believe in it. That the majority’s belief in creationist fairy tales is due to a lack of education is a golden irony willfully lost on the learned grandees of the AKP. Their reforms include the banning of over a thousand internet websites by the Turkish Telecommunications Directorate, including YouTube, the website of atheist scientist/writer Richard Dawkins, and at one point Blogger and Wordpress. Add to that a government-imposed $2.5 billion (yes, billion) tax fine on Dogan Holding—the only media conglomerate that is still independent and critical of the AKP—and it appears that the government’s avowed commitment of democratization and pluralism is just talk.
So, sure, besides all the de facto meddling of politics in religion by secularists, and the mixing of religion in politics by Islamists, Turkey enjoys at least nominal separation of religion and government—in theory anyway... French theory. But wait! Have you checked out our whirling dervishes and beauty queens? How ‘bout them Sufis!
Tolerance for all. (Except maybe you over there)
The same sorta/kinda caveat applies to the endless official lip service promoting our tolerance for other faiths and ethnicities. OK, compared to post-Bush Iraq or medieval Europe or Darfur, Turkey might as well be Sweden. But tell that to the Catholic priest who was stabbed to death in Trabzon in 2006, or the three Christian missionaries whose throats were slit and bodies mutilated in Malatya in 2007. The 2009 U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom report placed Turkey on its Watch List, along with Afghanistan, Cuba, the Russian Federation, and Venezuela. Then there’s the sad case of the Armenian writer Hrant Dink, who was shot dead in the middle of a busy Istanbul street in 2007 after repeatedly doing what no good Turk must ever do—speaking and writing about the great Turkish bugbear known officially as “the alleged Armenian Genocide.” After his arrest, Dink’s assassin was treated as a hero and cops posed with him for souvenir snapshots as they proudly brandished the Turkish flag.
This is troubling, especially given Turkey’s long history of acting nasty toward religious and ethnic minorities, a history the state is constantly trying to sweep under the carpet with a whistle and a wink. There was the pogrom of Greeks and Armenians in September 1955 in Istanbul; we’re (sort of) allowed to talk about that one. The Alevi Muslims’ houses of worship (Cemevi) have never been officially recognized, despite Alevis (a sect closer to Shiites) representing 20% of the population. The Kurds, who represent anywhere between 15% and 25% of the population (depending who you ask: just don’t ask too often), have revolted violently against the Turkish state 26 times. They were prohibited from speaking their mother tongue and officially referred to as “mountain Turks” until the 90’s. And then there’s the gigantic taboo concerning any discussion of whatever happened to the million, maybe two million, Armenians who resided in Eastern Turkey 90 years ago, and who are now, well, conspicuously no longer there. Draw your own conclusions… but you better keep them to yourself if they contradict official state doctrine.
Even animals aren’t exempt from our peculiar version of tolerance. In 2007 various indigenous animal species with subversive names—like the red fox known as Vulpes vulpes kurdistanica, or the wild sheep called Ovis armeniana, or the roe deer known as Capreolus capreolus armenus—were deemed to be abetting treason and secession by their very existence. That has now been resolved by an official decree of the Turkish Environment Ministry which erased all that separatist Kurdish- and Armenian-inspired nomenclature. Now we have the more palatable Vulpes vulpes, Ovis orientalis anatolicus, and Capreolus cuprelus capreolus. It’s like taxonomy by Stalin. So except for those minor tears and a few gaping holes in our big inclusive tent, and the recurring news footage of Kurdish children throwing rocks at Turkish Army vehicles in scenes reminiscent of the West Bank Intifada, Turkey is somewhat tolerant and discernibly democratic... ish.
And so it must be if Turkey is ever to fulfill its dream of joining the European Union, which would be worth a thousand cheesy P.R. campaigns as far as Turkey reeling in deep-pocket tourists and a dragon’s horde of foreign investment. Geographically, Turkey is part of both Europe and Asia (Meeting Point! Meeting Point!), but we might as well be in the head-chopping, torture-house-condoning Middle East as far as the EU is concerned. Human rights guarantees, which unfortunately for Turkey also extend to religious and ethnic minorities, are embedded in the stringent EU standards that sprout from Brussels and now stretch from Iceland to the eastern border of Poland (beyond which lie the wild frontiers of Putinland, where huge energy reserves allow the commissars and oligarchs to play by their own rules—just ask the Chechens!). Since 1987, Turkey has been taking baby steps to comply with EU standards and many experts think it will take at least another twenty years, if ever. Not exactly the fast track, but a track nevertheless… a gravelly, pot-holed, tortuous track growing ever fainter until it finally disappears into the poor, scrubby Anatolian wilderness crawling with those swarthy, scowling Muslims that most Europeans today can’t imagine ever letting into their precious political play pen.
Baby steps: the Minister of Justice Mehmet Ali Sahin is the first Turkish minister ever to publicly apologize to the family of someone tortured to death in police custody. A generous gesture to be sure, but what about the families of Engin Ceber (tortured to death in police custody), Feyzullah Ete (beaten to death by police while sitting in a park) and the thousands of others who undergo torture and death at the hands of the law on a what can be presumed to be a regular basis? We Turks barely notice. And when we do, we shrug and roll our eyes. Compare this apathy to our feisty Greek neighbors. They raised high hell with Molotov cocktails and flaming barricades in 2008 after a teenage protester was killed by riot police. In Greece, the justice minister didn’t just apologize, he resigned.
Say what you like, as long as we like what you say
The problem is that some reforms can’t be achieved incrementally. For example, amending Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which for decades made “insulting Turkishness” a crime. Violations have led to cringe-inducing CNN-worthy prosecutions and unofficial persecutions of hundreds of writers, including Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk (who now lives in New York due to death threats), award-winning author of The Bastard of Istanbul Elif Safak (who was heckled and spat at on her way to court), perennial Nobel long-shot Yasar Kemal, and the aforementioned, aforemurdered Armenian-Turkish writer Hrant Dink. Besides being a P.R. nightmare, Article 301 is seen as the greatest obstacle to achieving a legal framework acceptable to the EU. The muscles in Brussels wanted Turkey to scrap 301 altogether, but our parliament opted for a slight tweaking instead. Since 2008 the new law states that it’s a crime to insult “the Turkish nation,”, thus narrowing the “-ishness” of the original.
The result? Same old, same old. Just as Pamuk, Safak, and Dink were prosecuted under Article 301 for essentially using the words Armenian and genocide in the same sentence, since the amendment to Article 301 another writer—Ragip Zarakolu—was prosecuted for the same “crime.” You can still only say what you like as long as your opinions don’t run counter to the state-sanctioned view of things. Hard to take even baby steps when you’re saddled with such an overloaded dirty diaper. Or as the famous 13th century Sufi mystic and poet Rumi, who composed in Persian but lived and died in what is now Turkey, put it: “Most people guard against going into the fire, and so end up in it.”
Maybe Article 301 will eventually commit suicide: the ridicule and disgrace that Turkey suffers for it’s prosecution of citizens under this embarrassing law might itself be considered a breach of Article 301’s own prohibition against insulting Turkey. By this logic, the Constitutional Court could rule that Article 301 actually violates itself and order it scrapped. Unfortunately, any lawyer who put forth this legal argument would risk being charged under the very article he or she is attempting to abolish.
And what about the role of the army in Turkey? I’m not really at liberty to say because of Article 314 of the Turkish penal code, which basically states that the Turkish Armed Forces are always and forever beyond reproach, critique, or even a suspect sidelong glance. So I’ll skip that subject altogether, so as to avoid the fate of, say, author and newspaper columnist Perihan Magden, who went to jail for criticizing compulsory military service in Turkey and “publishing propaganda aimed at dissuading people from fulfilling their sacred duty.” Or if you prefer your chilling effect on free speech with a bit more sparkle, cleavage, and eye-shadow, consider Turkey’s most famous transvestite, singer Bülent Ersoy. She was charged for the same “crime” after saying on live TV (as a judge on Turkey’s music reality show “Popstar Alaturka”) that if she could have a son she would not allow him to do his stretch in the army.
Even while recognizing our country’s shortcomings, it’s clear to us Turks that Europe doesn’t appreciate the buffer zone we represent between their cherished secular humanism and the shouting mullahs and incendiary shaheeds whose fondest desire is to blow the godless West to smithereens. The EU gate-keepers would do well to consider who might be knocking on their door a few years from now if the AKP agenda continues apace. Because contrary to propaganda spread by the government through it’s tourism campaigns and paid advertising “special reports” in the Economist and the International Herald Tribune, there is an intense struggle inside Turkey over which way we should be heading: West or East, towards Europe or away. The news-making polarization between Islamists and secularists reflects an even more profound socio-economic rift in Turkish society. A newly urbanized Islamic and conservative Anatolian bourgeoisie is increasingly challenging the Kemalist/secularist hold on power anchored in Istanbul and Ankara. Like everywhere else in the world, our poor masses like the stability and low-budget solace that religion provides, while our wealthy citizens prefer the freedoms and new sensations that only money can buy. The quotidian dichotomies can be shocking. There’s a Millionaire’s Fair in Istanbul where you can go yacht shopping. But not if you’re one of the hundreds of people waiting in a mile-long line to purchase government-subsidized coal to heat your home in winter. Western Turkey looks like a developed, industrialized, affluent country, while in the eastern provinces there are feudal landowners, endogamy, troglodytes, honor killings, and even a recently-discovered clan of quadrupeds who seem to have devolved back to knuckle-dragging through the Anatolian dust.
These extremes aren’t surprising when you consider that Turkey ranks among the top countries in Europe for billionaires, while at the same time being one of Europe’s poorest nations, consistently among GDP per capita bottom trawlers like Bulgaria and Romania. If anything, Turkey seems to be Mexicanizing rather than Europeanizing. The Western way of life feels exclusionary to many Turks; not just the EU’s snobbish sniffing at our old world ways, but the implications that globalization, gender equality, free markets, and secularism have for our strong traditions of family and community. By comparison, the Middle East’s culture seems comforting, inclusive, and non-threatening. Clannish isn’t a slur here. There are no velvet ropes at the mosques.
East or West, which is best?
But how to bridge the gap? The ulema (Muslim scholars) gripe about the degeneracy of our upper classes. The sunbed-orange, rhinoplastied rich chicks and their Rolex-wearing, iPhone-tapping consorts are too busy drinking twenty-dollar cocktails at seaside nightclubs to notice. The egalitarian (in terms of class, if not gender) and community-providing attraction of Islam has emerged as an alternative world view to the aggressive, winner-takes-all ethos associated with the West’s capitalism and free markets. Atatürk would not be pleased; his ideological descendants clearly are not—an alleged coup conspiracy was made public in March 2007 when Nokta, a large-circulation magazine, published the diary of the head of the Navy. There seems a tacit threat in Turkey’s persistent demand to join the EU—if you let us in our people will prosper and become immune to the siren call of jihad; leave us out and Sharia-ville here we come. Some wags claim the military tolerate the AKP’s Islamic agenda as a strategy to scare the EU into letting us swim in their pool (which further hinges on the enormous can of worms called Cyprus being resolved as well—good luck with that!)
So what kind of crossroads is this? The bridge more often resembles a giant dividing wall with Turks smashing their heads against it on either side. The melting pot has been left untended on the stove too long and is boiling over with conflict and animosity. And the “Crossroads” itself? Well, that might soon be deemed too Christian an expression and changed to “Crescentroads,” which would actually be a more apposite metaphor considering the Islamists are convinced they can follow their own parabolic path around modernity while eroding the secular state bit by bit. Our storied intersection of cultures has become an inner suction of xenophobic paranoia. This “Meeting Point of Civilizations” I supposedly live in has become a city of estranged elements, divided between haves and have-nots, between Muslims and non-Muslims, between pious orthodox Muslims and secular Muslims, between nationalists and traitors, between jingoistic anthem-chanters and nervous minorities who can’t forget history even if the government decrees amnesia. Surely a nation that aspires to be a bridge between cultures, faiths, and ideas must first build those bridges within. It should be more important to us Turks to convince ourselves that we’re a tolerant and secular mosaic than to try to persuade the rest of the world when there’s so much that contradicts the propaganda.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. This year Turkish state television launched a Kurdish-language channel, TRT 6. When Hrant Dink was murdered by ultranationalists two years ago, hundreds of thousands of Turks poured into the streets with placards that read “We are all Armenians” without getting tear-gassed and beaten by our infamously zealous riot police. The prime minister himself has described the gradual disappearance of Turkey’s minorities to be the product of a “fascistic attitude.” Author Nedim Gürsel, accused of insulting Islam in his novel Daughters of Allah, was recently acquitted by an Istanbul court. And most recently, the Turkish government has started the long-overdue process of finding a political solution to the Kurdish problem; the aim is to formulate a national strategy that would finally put an end to a bloody 25-year conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives. It’s early days yet, but these are all promising steps in the right direction—which is to say, West.
Who knows, maybe someday we Turks might even begin to believe in our own clichés. Maybe we’ll even live up to them. Or to quote Rumi again for a kicker: “Appear as you are, Be as you appear.”
