Elections in Turkey

In a couple of hours, the Turks will start heading to the polls to elect a new parliament. As you might have heard by now, the election is considered crucial for the future of the country. In this election the Turks will decide whether the current AKP government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will continue its rule as a single party government or not.

The AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development Party) has become an issue in Turkey due to the Islamist background of its founders. The party leaders have described the AKP as a party of the center right, but the secularists remain skeptic about its aims. They believe that the AKP has a hidden agenda and simply uses democracy as a tool to achieve its ultimate goal: an Islamic state.

The main opponents of the AKP are the secularists of the CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, Republican People's Party), the party established by Turkey's founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The CHP holds the label "leftist" but is not really leftist in its policies. I personally do not find the CHP really interesting. They are too rigid in their ideology and simply too nationalist.

Interesting, however, are two independent candidates. I'm talking about Baskın Oran, professor at the University of Ankara, and Ufuk Uras, former chairman of ÖDP (Özgürlük ve Dayanışma Partisi, Freedom and Solidarity Party) and professor at the University of Istanbul. These two men represent the small liberal leftist community in Turkey. I'm not sure whether they will be elected, but if they will be, I'm sure they will contribute a lot to Turkey. Pay attention to these two names!

A useful Q&A about the election is provided by Al Jazeera, for those who wish to get more background information.

The Turkish-Egyptian fez issue

As a want to finish my thesis this month, I've been writing and reading a lot this week. I had never imagined that I could use some of that reading material for my blog - most of it is too serious too handle - but I've stumbled upon some really funny stories.

It appears that Turkey and Egypt were on the brink of a serious crisis for a fez - or tarboosh as it is called in Egypt - somewhere in the thirties. The fez is a conical red hat that was worn by men in most parts of the Middle East, until the first half of the 20^th century.


The Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II (reign 1876-1909) wearing a fez


Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk), the Turkish leader that established the Republic of Turkey and carried out a series of reforms in his efforts to modernize his country, prohibited the fez on the ground that it was a sign of backwardness or whatever. You might not believe it, but people were actually put in jail for wearing the fez. Such was the sensitivity of the Kemalists regarding a simple headgear.

Well, the postwar (referring here to World War I) Egyptian regime had no such problems with the fez - or tarboosh I must say - and kept the hats just as they were. In fact, it was part of the Egyptian national attire and was hence also worn by Egyptian diplomats abroad. So when the Egyptian diplomatic envoy to Turkey, Abdel Malek Hamza Bey, attended a 'Day of the Republic' celebration where Mustafa Kemal himself was present too, he had no idea that he was 'offending' the Ghazi (that's Mustafa Kemal's nickname in Turkey) by wearing his beloved tarboosh!

Upon seeing the tarboosh, the Turkish officials hurried to Hamza Bey with the request to put it off, but he refused and declared that it was an essential part of his national attire. Feeling insulted himself by the officials he promptly left the place.

When the reason for Hamza Bey's unexpected departure was made public, the Turkish and Egyptian press - the Daily Herald in London too by the way - took the issue to a another level by dealing with it as a matter of national dignity. While some argued that Egypt's dignity was violated and asked for an apology, others claimed that no such thing was the case and that Turkey would not need to apologize at all. At the end, the two parties managed to come to an agreement and the incident passed without serious consequences.

Some twenty years later, in 1952, the tarboosh was abolished in Egypt by the newly established republican regime - yes, yes also in the case of Egypt it was a republican regime! At the same time, all relations with Turkey were broken off.

I love the irony of it.

The Turkish dilemma

Two ordinary Turks having a chat:

Ali: If you were rowing a boat with only one extra seat and passed by a deserted island with the Prophet Muhammad and Ataturk, whom would you save?

Veli: Ataturk is resourceful. He can save himself. I'd take Muhammad.

The struggle against and for the center-right

After Ankara and Istanbul (see my post on April 29^th), a major demonstration in favor of the secular establishment in Turkey, is now also being held in the Aegean city of Izmir, Turkey's third largest city. As one can see on the pictures, the demonstration is quite similar to the one in Istanbul; beside the usual banners, the main instruments of demonstration are again Turkish flags, portraits of founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and war veterans in late Ottoman/early Republican military uniforms. Today, however, I'm not going to complain about nationalism.


Fatih Saribas / Reuters


Hürriyet


Hürriyet

According to news reports, the demonstration is attended by hundreds of thousands of people. An unnamed military officer in Izmir even mentioned a number of 1.5 million. Similar numbers were also mentioned for the demonstrations in Ankara and Istanbul earlier.¹ It should be clear that these demonstrations are not 'just demonstrations'; they are quite significant, they mean something.

Supporters of the current AKP² government have usually claimed that the current resistance to change in Turkey, is simply because the secular elite doesn't want to loose the favorable position that it has had in the past 84 years. This argument would imply that the issue is strictly bound to the elite and that there is a difference between what the elite wants and what the people want.

The huge number of participants in the last three demonstrations indicate that this is not simply a matter of 'an elite resisting change' at all. A considerable part of the population does favor the secular establishment and does believe that its way of life might be in danger - perhaps not immediately, but in the longer term. Even though the AKP has often expressed its attachment to democracy and the secular establishment in Turkey and has claimed to be a center-rightist or moderate conservative party, the secularists have never really trusted the party. ³

On the other hand, another considerable part of the population has indeed considered the AKP as a party of the center-right. It is this fact that complicates the Turkish political landscape.

Since the beginning of the multi-party system in Turkey in 1946, the Turkish political scene has been characterized by a struggle between the center-right and the center-left. The center-right has usually been the dominant political wing in Turkey. Its main opponent, the center-left, won elections only a couple of times.
The center-right was in the fifties represented by the Demokrat Parti, in the sixties and seventies by Adalet Partisi (Justice Party), in the eighties by Anavatan Partisi (Motherland Party) and in the nineties by Doğru Yol Partisi (True Path Party) and again Anavatan Partisi. Now it seems that this task is being carried out by the AKP.

So, in a way, the traditional political struggle between the center-right and the center-left is being continued as before. The situation is just more complicated now, because the current party claiming to represent the center-right has itself actually no origins in the center-right, but rather in the religious right.

The center-left has reacted to this situation by adjusting its political rhetoric to attract not only leftist voters (who are already secularist) but also the secularist rightist voters. On the other hand, the traditional center-right, being pushed out of the political scene by AKP in the first half of this decade, now wants to return and to regain its position. In its campaign the traditional center-right too uses the secularist rethoric, as they want to create the impression that it is exactly this point that distinguishes the traditional center-right from AKP.

And there they are, hundreds of thousands demonstrating against the AKP government and in favor of secularism! Among them is the center-left, struggling against the center-right... And among them is also the traditional center-right, struggling for the center-right.⁴

1. "Turks stage rally against Islamic-rooted government", in International Herald Tribune, 13 May 2007; available at http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/05/13/europe/EU-GEN-Turkey-Secular-Rally.php (accessed on 05/13/07)
"Turks rally in Izmir despite blast", in Al Jazeera, 13 May 2007; available at http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/476B952C-8237-4629-9369-77DF4E1A7BC0.htm (accessed on 05/13/07)
2. Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development Party.
3. The reason for this is that the AKP was founded by former members of the Fazilet Partisi (Virtue Party) and the Refah Partisi (Welfare Party) , the former being the successor of the latter. Both parties were suspected of anti-secular tendencies and were subsequently closed down by court decision. The AKP was founded in 2001 as a center-rightist or moderate conservative party, but with the previous political affiliations of its founders still fresh in the memory, the six years since its foundation just haven't been enough to convince secularists of this change in political orientation.
4. These demonstrations are not organized by political parties, but by civil society organizations. There are those who want to depict the demonstrations as pro-center-left, but indubitably the demonstrations are also attended by rightist secularists.

Escaping sexual moral codes on the internet

Yesterday I stumbled upon a very particular news item in a Turkish daily.¹ At first I was shocked by the news item itself and soon after by the very fact that I was shocked in the first place. In my few trips to the Middle East, the very first thing that I noticed was exactly that what appeared from this news item. It was actually nothing new for me, was it? Or was it just that I hadn't expected it to be that pathetic?!

I'm talking about the conclusions of Google's Zeitgeist and Trends services, which report about search trends all over the world. The funny thing is that you can actually look up the information yourself! Try it out!

Anyway, the news item focused on a couple of very remarkable keywords: sex, porno and child porn. In all three cases Turkey ended up in the top ten - and in the last case even as number one.² I especially found the top ten for "sex" very interesting, please have a look at it:
1. Pakistan
2. Egypt
3. India
4. Turkey
5. Morocco
6. Viet Nam
7. Iran
8. Saudi Arabia
9. Indonesia
10. Serbia and Montenegro

I don't know anything about Viet Nam, but isn't it just so typical that all the others in the list are countries with a rather conservative sexual moral code? Isn't it funny that those who criticize the West for lacking sexual morality, are actually embarassed by members of their own society on this specific subject? I love the irony!

Searching "sex" on the internet itself is a quite trivial consequence of the suppression of sexuality by society, but it can actually lead to much more worrying situations. Several months ago women were sexually assaulted by gangs of men in downtown Cairo in broad daylight. The incident was much discussed in the Egyptian blogosphere; read this account of Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey (who has just quit blogging). This was apparently not the first time. Journalist Hossam el-Hamalawy writes in his blog that a similar incident occured in January last year.

On Malek's blog you can actually see pictures of the incident (the blog is in arabic, scroll down for the pictures).

Just don't ask me where the police was when all of this happened. OK?

1. "Seks arayışındaki tanıdık ülkeler" ["Familiar countries in the list of googling sex"], in Radikal, internet baskisi, 05/07/07; available at http://213.243.28.21/ek_haber.php?ek=sa&haberno=3473 (accessed on 05/08/07).
2. Please note that this does not imply that these keywords are the most googled keywords in Turkey; they are not! The top ten of most googled keywords is in fact not very unusual and certainly not embarrassing: Most googled keywords in Turkey

Hızır arrives with drops from heaven

Six weeks long, the people in the low lands of Northwest Europe enjoyed the rays of Helios without being disturbed by drops from the skies. Apparently, Haddad¹ became so inconvenient about this exceptionally long period, that he finally made it rain yesterday.

It's quite remarkable that it started raining on this specific day, the 6th of May. No, I'm not referring to the misfortune of Sarkozy being elected president and neither to the hanging of 21 prominent Muslim and Christian Arabs in Beirut and Damascus by Djemal Pasha, 91 years ago on this day (and please don't make me start talking about the inability of the Turkish parliament to elect any president, whatever his political background!). I'm rather referring to the much more pleasant event of Hıdırellez, the day that marks the beginning of the Days of Hızır.

Hıdırellez is a holiday celebrated in the Levant, mostly in Turkey, but also by Roma and Albanians in the Balkans. In the Western world the holiday is better known by its Romany name, Ederlezi, due to Emir Kusturica's "The Time of the Gypsies" ("Dom za vešanje") and Goran Bregović's soundtrack for this film, "Ederlezi".

The name Hıdırellez is actually a contraction of the names Hızır, or Hıdır (Arabic: الخضر, al Khiḍr), and Ilyas (Arabic: إلياس), both of them religious personages. Hızır is believed to be a saint, sometimes also considered a prophet, that became immortal by drinking from the spring of life (ab-ı hayat) and has pretty much all of Jesus' (or any other prophet's) supernatural abilities. Ilyas is the Arabic, Persian and Turkish name for Elijah, a prophet in ancient Israel mentioned in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), the Christian Bible (New Testament) and the Qur'an (Newest Testament?).


Hızır and Ilyas sitting at the Fountain of Life.
source: www.khidr.org

In Turkey, the two act among others as the protecters of travellers. According to traditional belief, 6 May (23 April according to the Julian calendar) is the day on which Hızır and Ilyas meet each other to decide in which part of the world each of them will serve. It is usually thought that Ilyas takes care of travellers at sea and Hızır of those on land.²

This great meeting, however, is not the main reason for people celebrating it. Hıdırellez is actually a holiday marking the beginning of a new season: the summer. In the old Rumî (=Julian) calendar, the year was usually split in two seasons: the summery Days of Hızır (6 May - 8 November) and the winterly Days of Kasım. In this respect, Hıdırellez is actually part of an old common tradition in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East of celebrating the arrival of the temperate season. Nowruz is another example of such a tradition.

In fact, celebrations on the 6^th of May are also held by Orthodox Christians in the Balkans. They celebrate the day of Saint George (Serbian: Ђурђевдан, Đurđevdan, Bulgarian: Гергьовден, Gergyovden), a saint considered important by many Christian nations. However, just as in the case of Hıdırellez, the celebration is actually related to the arrival of the summer.

It may not be a complete coincidence that Saint George's Day and Hıdırellez fall on exactly the same day and are so similar to each other. There are some indications that Hızır is actually associated with Saint George (Arabic: مار جرجس, Mar Jirjis/Girgis). Near Betlehem, Muslim and Christian Arabs and Jews commonly visit a shrine of Saint George and all refer to the saint by the name al Khiḍr. In the Balkans, Muslim Albanians refer to the saint as Hızır, while Christian Albanians call him Saint George.³ It must be no coincidence either that the alternative name for Hıdırellez is simply Ruz-ı Hızır: Hızır's Day.

Anyhow, while the Balkans and the Levant are welcoming summer with celebrations, I'm welcoming it with drops falling from a grey sky...

1. Haddad, sometimes called Ba'al (Lord), is the Mesopotamian God of the sky, the storm and the rain. He is equated to the Egyptian Set, the Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter, Norse Thor and Germanic Thunder.
2. Uysal, A.E. and W.S. Walker, "An Ancient God in Modern Turkey: Some Aspects of the Cult of Hizir" in Journal of American folklore nr. 86, 1997; available at http://khidr.org/hizir.htm (accessed on 07/05/07)
3. Hanauer, J.E., Folk-lore of the Holy Land, Moslem, Christian and Jewish, 1907; available at http://www.sacred-texts.com/asia/flhl/flhl12.htm (accessed on 07/05/07);
Hasluck, F.W., Christianity and Islam under the Sultans. Oxford University Press, 1929, pp. 319-336 Chapter 2: "Koranic Saints"; available at http://khidr.org/khidr-turkey.htm (accessed on 07/05/07).

In Turkey, everything changes but May Day

A few days ago I showed some pictures of the pro-secularism demonstration in Istanbul on the 29th of April. Below are pictures of another demonstration in the same city:


Volkan Şahin / Birgün


Volkan Şahin / Birgün


Volkan Şahin / Birgün


Volkan Şahin / Birgün

These pictures are taken during the demonstration on the 1^st of May. Trying to guess why these pictures are so different? Hint: look at the date again! Yep, it was May Day!¹

This whole event was actually organized to commemorate the 30^th anniversary of the 1977 'Bloody' May Day demonstration, when gunmen fired at peaceful demonstrators, killing 34 people. It is quite ironic that even the commemoration of this incident is perceived as such a great threat by the authorities, that public transport is paralyzed, tv stations are prevented from live broadcasting the demonstration, busses from outside Istanbul are blocked from entering the city and demonstrators are harassed with water cannons, tear gas and batons. At the end of the day several hundreds of people had been arrested.

Well, we live in 2007 now, which means that it has already been 17 years since the 'communist threat' ceased to exist. In the meantime, a true classical Islamist occupied the office of Prime Minister in the staunch secularist Turkey (back in the '90s), and yet another one, appearing to be the 'evolved' version of the former, is currently doing the same... Wow, can you imagine that?! Apparently things do change in Turkey!

So what's new for May Day then? Uh... Nothing, Turkey has a chronic allergy to anything that is associated with socialism!

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1. For more about the demonstration:
- "Hundreds detained in Turkey rally" (BBC, 01/05/07)
- "Hundreds arrested at Istanbul rally" (Al Jazeera, 01/05/07)

'Red Sunday' in Istanbul

A few images of a particular event in Istanbul today:


Murad Sezer / The Associated Press


Reuters



Hürriyet


Hürriyet

Looking at these images, one might think that it is national holiday in Turkey at the moment, or that Turkey just won the FIFA World Cup, the Eurovision Songfestival, or the Miss Universe beauty contest. In the worst case one might think that Turkey just gained its independence after a mythical war against imperialist powers... But none of these are the reason for this 'Red Sunday' in Istanbul.

The pictures above are taken during a demonstration¹ in favor of secularism and against the ruling AK Parti.² Surprised? You shouldn't be! In a country like Turkey it is quite normal to combat 'religious threats' with national symbols like flags, war veterans and pictures of the founding father (did you notice that I used the singular form?)!

It doesn't make sense to you, does it? Well, let us continue then. Drawing the Turkish flag on your cheeks and walking together with war veterans, while holding a massive picture of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, surely won't topple the AK Parti government! But these things do represent the issue as a matter of national existence (!), especially if you do this on a massive scale, like in the demonstration today.

So, what happens if national existence is threatened? Apparently, this question was asked much earlier by some very special people: read this.

I'm eagerly waiting for the moment the generals will say: "We have changed!".

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1. For more about the demonstration see:
- "Hundreds of thousands rally against government in Istanbul" (IHT, 29/04/07)
- "Massive pro-secular demo in Turkey" (Al Jazeera, 29/04/07)
2. The AK Parti (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; English: Justice and Development Party) is a political party founded by former members of the Fazilet Party and the Refah Party, the latter being the predecessor of the former. Both of these parties were suspected of anti-secular activities and were subsequently closed down by court decision. The AK Parti, under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, declared that it was following another path than its predecessors and regularly expressed its attachment to the secular establishment. Especially Erdoğan's historical statement "I have changed!" became very popular in the Turkish political scene. Many secular Turks, however, have been rather sceptical about these statements.