Proposed Adultery Law Reveals Rifts in Turkey
Al hayat 2004/09/20
Turkey
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is caught between the European Union, which is demanding that Turkey reform its criminal code, and his conservative and pro-Islamic supporters who are insisting that such changes should include criminalizing adultery.
The conflict is so deep that Erdogan withdrew the entire criminal code reform package from parliament last week, raising serious doubts as to whether Turkey can pass the reforms before an October EU report that will recommend whether the country is ready to start membership talks.
Erdogan's conflict highlights the challenges that overwhelmingly Muslim Turkey faces in trying to integrate with the bloc, whose mostly Christian population is itself grappling with the fundamental question of what it means to be a "European."
Should EU membership merely be a function of economics or of meeting certain demands in the areas of judicial reform, democracy, and treatment of minorities? Does geography matter -- and if so does Turkey, with a foothold in what is commonly accepted as the European continent, qualify?
"Basically, Turkey doesn't understand what EU membership entails," said Suat Kiniklioglu, director of the Ankara Center for Turkish Policy Studies. "The government has been focusing on a date (for accession negotiations) rather having a healthy discussion of what EU membership means."
Reflecting the crisis, the Istanbul stock market dropped more than 2% today, following a fall on Friday of almost 4%. Erdogan's Cabinet was meeting today afternoon to discuss the adultery issue and the prime minister was likely to use a trip to Brussels later in the week to try to assure the bloc that Turkey's bid was still on track.
A poll released this month by the German Marshall Fund of the United States found that although 73% of Turkish citizens supported EU membership, 70% saw the main benefit as economic.
The poll also suggested that Turks are relatively indifferent toward the EU; Turkish respondents asked to score their fondness for the bloc, gave it a mere 52 out of 100.
Sefik Cevik, a 21-year-old university student in Ankara, said he strongly supported Turkey's EU bid, hoping that eventual membership would make it easier for him to travel and study abroad, and boost his job chances after graduation.
therwise, "it's not so important," he said.
Many Turks appear lukewarm toward the sweeping reforms, such as ones abolishing the death penalty, granting greater language rights to Kurds, and trimming the role of the military in politics, that parliament has adopted in recent years and many say that the pressure for change came from the EU, rather than from within the country.
"They (Europeans) say do this and we do this," Cevik said.
Erdogan's Justice and Development Party finds itself at the center of this ambivalence.
The party has roots in Turkey's Islamic movement but has consistently denied any Islamic agenda and has made the country's EU bid its top priority since coming to power in 2002.
That has been enormously popular in Turkey, where many see the EU as a ticket to join the wealthy West. Many others see membership as the culmination of the reforms that transformed Turkey into a modern, pro-Western republic built on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.
But some of Erdogan's core supporters are conservative, religious Muslims, who want Erdogan to promote a conservative, pro-Islamic agenda, such as easing unpopular bans on Islamic headscarves at universities and criminalizing adultery, which was illegal in Turkey until 1996 when Turkey's top court struck it down.
Ironically, some see EU membership as a way of ultimately furthering the cause of Islam, in that in an EU nation the military, seen as the guarantor of secularism here, would not be able to influence politics as it long has in Turkey.
The pressures on Erdogan came to a head last week when members of his party demanded that an adultery ban be included in a package of reforms aimed at boosting Turkey's EU chances.
Critics said the measure would do the exact opposite by bringing Turkey closer to Islamic law than to that of the EU and would jeopardize the EU bid.
Unable to reconcile those differences, Erdogan responded by withdrawing the entire reform package from parliament.
"I don't understand what this issue has to do with European Union," Erdogan said Friday. "Nobody has a right to meddle in our internal affairs and the operation of our parliament."
"I've always said, the EU isn't something we can't do without," he added.
The mixed messages come at a key time for Turkey.
Many Europeans are already skeptical of Turkey's chances of joining the bloc, some arguing that Turkey as a Muslim country simply isn't European; others saying it's simply in it for the money and that accepting a country of 70 million would burst EU budgets.
Adding to the mix have been recent statements by U.S. President George W. Bush urging Europeans to look favorably on Turkey's bid for membership.
EU enlargement commissioner Guenter Verheugen told Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper Sunday that in any case the reforms required of Turkey were "an indispensable prerequisite" for the European Union to start membership talks with it.
"Now comes the moment of truth," he said. "Turkey must find the strength to reconcile traditional Turkish values with European values. The European values are nonnegotiable."
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