Can Turkey Digest Reforms?
Other members of the group are as follows: Former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard, former Secretary General of Council of Europe Marcelino Oreja Aguirre, leader of the Radical Party group in the European Parliament Emma Bonino, former Dutch Foreign Minister Hans van der Broek, renowned sociologist and former dean of the London School of Economics Anthony Giddens, former premier of Saxony Kurt Biedenkopf, and former Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Gemerek. Senior Austrian diplomat Albert Rohan is acting as the Rapporteur of the commission. The mission of the group is to examine the challenges and opportunities presented by Turkey's possible membership of the EU.
The Commission, which is sponsored by the British Council and the Open Society Institute, will present its report in September. Members of the Commission other than Giddens, Biedenkopf and Gemerek visited Turkey last week, and had contacts with official and other circles in Ankara and Istanbul.
I too attended a meeting with the commission, and tried to explain the convergence in favor of EU membership of almost all sections of Turkish society, i.e. the role EU's 'soft power' has played in promoting radical democratic reforms in Turkey at a time when international terror threats have led to restrictions on freedoms all over the world.
Rocard posed an interesting question to me: "Turkey has achieved radical reforms in a relatively short period of time. Doesn't this carry the risk of the reforms not being digested by society, and thus possible reversal?" I would like to share with my readers my response.
Turkish society has been struggling for the last 20 years, to free itself from the straight jacket of severe restrictions on basic individual rights and freedoms imposed by the constitution and more than 600 laws adopted by the military regime that was in power between 1980 - 83.
If today the vast majority of the Turkish society with all of its major segments, including the Sunni and the Alevi, Turks and Kurds, employers and workers, rural and urban dwellers supports EU membership, it is because of the wish to see the basic rights and freedoms irreversibly consolidated.
The vast majority of Turkey's population has appropriated the culture of democracy. The 'mentality revolution' needed for the full implementation of democratic reforms, concerns not the Turkish society but the state and the bureaucracy.
Turkish society, due to its traditions, is respectful of different opinions, beliefs and lifestyles. The role that Turkish Islam plays in this cannot be underestimated. There were numerous efforts during and after the Cold War to provoke hostility between the right and the left, Sunnis and Alevis, Turks and Kurds, religious and others.
It would be very misleading to explain the failure of various provocations to push the country into civil war, and especially the efforts of separatist terrorism to spark a Turkish - Kurdish war by state suppression, neither suppression by the state can account for the evolution of the Islamist movement in Turkey towards abandoning radicalism and committing itself to democratic principles. On the contrary, Turkish society has learned by experience that domestic problems can be overcome, unity and peace be secured only by broadening the scope of freedoms and democracy.
It is therefore unfortunate that the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in its recent decision sustaining the headscarf ban in Turkish universities has fully adopted the assumption that in Turkey secularism can only be secured by state control of religion and restriction of religious freedoms. I will continue with this issue in my next column. (SA/YE)
* The article's original Turkish version was published by Zaman daily in July6, 2004.