Press Review: Turkey in International Media
Strange remedies to violence against women, a mosque in Cuba, Turkish foreign policy – a glass half full, genocide commissions, religious
20.02.2015
Turkish women “tell their story” after a brutal rape and murder while government supporters have a different tale.
As women protest the murder of Özgecan Aslan, others suggest measures to reduce violence against women– including state subsidised prostitution.
Following the murder of Özgecan Aslan Turkish women shared their experiences of sexual abuse on Twitter using the hashtag #sendeanlat. (#tellyourstory). The 20-year old student was stabbed to death by a mini-bus driver during an attempted rape. The driver admitted to have killed Aslan when she tried to repel his advances with pepper spray. Then, with the help of his father and a family friend, the man burned the dead body and dumped it into a river.
The outrage provoked calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty, while activists argued that the government’s reinforcement of patriarchal values was the real problem.
Even before the attack a parliamentary commission to investigate violence against women was underway. An Al-Monitor article lists the AKP-members’ unconventional approaches to reducing the incidence of violence against women.
Deputy Ismet Ucma for example suggested a “license of competence to wed” or the fostering of neighbourhood honour as counteractions, not taking into account that “honour” is one of the mosdt common justifications for violent acts. The weekly payment of 75 TL to unmarried Turkish men as "sexual necessity credit” would make them work off their aggressions on prostitutes instead of abusing women, proposed attorney Yavuz Balkan. Marriage counsellor Sibel Uresin blamed the high rate of violence against women on women’s own habit of talking back to men.
Meanwhile Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, promoting AKP’s family model, encouraged university students to marry before their graduation and to have at least three children. For choosing “the career of motherhood,” as Health Minister Muezzinoğlu put it, Davutoğlu promised financial subsidies to reward mothers. The approach includes allowing women to work for 4 hours a day on full salary for at least one year after birth.
This policy will lead to an exclusion of women from the labour market, says Zülfikar Doğan in his article at Al-Monitor. He suspects that “to increase the number of illiterate and oppressed women, severed from productivity and working life, is thus emerging as the secret political agenda of the AKP’s policy of Sunni political Islam.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/11413962/Turkey-protests-as-young-woman-murdered-after-attempted-rape.html
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/weltspiegel/ueber-twitter-zu-demonstrationen-aufgerufen-proteste-nach-mord-an-studentin-in-der-tuerkei/11378666.html
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/02/turkey-sexuality-creates-uproar.html
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/02/turkey-government-early-marriages.html
Sniping at Obama’s domestic policy Erdoğan tries to secure his position as the voice of the Islamic World and foster Turkey’s independent role from the US.
"If you stay silent when faced with an incident like this, and don't make a statement, the world will stay silent towards you," said the Turkish president addressing his US-American counterpart. Erdoğan was criticising Obama for his silence in the face of the fatal shooting in Chapel Hill, N.C. the murder of three Muslim Americans. The Turkish president assumed the incident was an Islamophobic hate crime, but according to veteran columnist Cengiz Çandar Erdoğan was also trying to assert his role as a spokesperson of Islam in the Western World. The frosty relationship of the United States’ ally with Washington dates back from former disagreements about Turkey’s political role in the Middle East.
M. Hakan Yavuz, professor for political science at the University of Utah argues that Turkey’s more independent foreign policy will serve US-goal in the long run. Reviewing Turkey’s recent foreign policy measures in a New York Times’ opinion editorial he argues that like the military support of Kurdish peshmerga in Syria, he contradicts the widespread condemnation of AK-Party’s policy.
Following its harsh response to the 2013 Gezi Park protests AKP has been criticized for weakening democracy, but, according to Yavuz, “he has also done more than any other Turkish leadership to end the Kurdish conflict. Turkey hosts 1.6 million Syrian refugees […] fleeing the Islamic State”. He defends Turkey for being “far more democratic than its neighbours” and askes Western powers to support the country’s positive engagement in the Middle East.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/02/13/turkeys-erdogan-to-obama-wheres-the-outrage-about-chapel-hill-shootings/?tid=sm_tw
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/02/turkey-united-states-erdogan-obama-kerry.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/opinion/turkey-asserts-its-role-in-the-middle-east.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimesworld
Armenian genocide: President Erdoğan proposed setting up a commission of inquiry into 1915
One hundred years after the genocide against the Armenian people under the rule of the Ottoman Empire Turkey’s president wants to establish an expert commission to find out the truth. With this proposal and his last year’s commemoration of the atrocities Erdoğan tries to demonstrate Turkey’s openness in dealing with its past.
Nevertheless, German Tagesspiegel suspects that this new step is a pretext to prevent international recognition of the genocide. Officially the Turkish government admits that many Armenians perished during the forced resettlements, but refuses to acknowledge the 1915 as a genocide.
For the 100th anniversary on April 24 – the day when deportations started – Erdoğan invited statesmen and -women to commemorate Turkey’s battle of Gallipoli during World War I. Not surprisingly Armenian President Sarkisian refused this invitation.
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/vor-dem-100-jahrestag-der-massaker-die-neue-tuerkische-armenien-strategie/11359666.html
Turkey’s president wants to construct a mosque in Cuba
History has been written wrong. It wasn’t Christopher Columbus to be the first to enter the American continent “Muslims discovered America in 1178,” Erdoğan explained his version of history last November.
Visiting Cuba on his Latin America tour the Turkish president talked to the local authorities about the plans to build a mosque in Havana for the estimated number of 1,500 Muslims living in the country; most of them students from Pakistan and Indonesia. The place of worship will be modelled after Istanbul’s Ortaköy Mosque, the Washington Post article explains not hiding the author’s amusement about Erdoğan’s misinterpretation of history. Given Cuban negotiations with Saudis about a different mosque Turkey’s president made clear: "We want to build the mosque ourselves. We don’t want a partner."
Erdoğan justifies his presumption of Muslims’ long-lasting engagement in the Americas in a journal’s passage saying that Columbus compared the countryside of San Salvador Island with a mosque on a mountain’s summit.
The Cuban mosque is part of a broader state-sponsored program by the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs, or Diyanet, constructing mosques in countries, including the United States, Albania, and Somalia. Beyond providing a place of worship to Muslims around the world the program serves as an instrument of foreign policy, strengthening yet again Erdoğan’s role as spokesman of the Islamic World.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/02/12/turkeys-erdogan-wants-to-build-a-mosque-in-cuba-its-based-on-a-historical-fallacy/?tid=sm_tw
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/02/turkey-mosque-building-soft-power.html
Wide scale conversion of public schools into religious Imam Hatip schools, making it difficult for parents to find secular education for their children.
In 1997, the year of the so called postmodern military coup, the government set about closing schools that specialise in religious education. In 2002 the governing Justice and Development Party set about reversing that policy. The number of pupils attending Imam Hatip schools now stands at almost 1 million; some 9 percent of all students in Turkey.
Support for religious education is an act of revenge for the Kemalist modernisation, according to sociology professor Tahir Abbas. He criticises the government for transferring Islam from the private to the public sphere and trying to frame the “ideal Muslim citizen.”
Parents seeking to provide for their children with an education free of ideological doctrines enrol them at private schools, where religious devotion is substituted by a glorification of the Turkish state. “We are squeezed between only bad choices, between the state-controlled worship of God and the state-controlled worship of Atatürk,” activist Sedat Dogan says.