GREEN SHOOTS
Cihan News Agency (CNA), Turkey
November 5, 2013 Tuesday
ISTANBUL (CIHAN)- Turkey’s halting march toward better democratic
standards often appears frustratingly slow, marred by setbacks like
the narrowing space for press freedom or the brutal handling of the
Gezi unrest.
It is, however, useful to take stock occasionally and identify issues
where progress has been achieved. Rewinding the tape allows us to
measure the distance covered, and it offers hope for the future.
The long-awaited arrival in Parliament of the headscarved Justice
and Development Party (AKP) deputies on Oct. 31 turned out to be so
uneventful that it was tempting to ask “What was all the fuss about?”
Their presence at Parliament seemed perfectly natural — and indeed it
was in a country where some 60 percent of women wear a headscarf. But
for those who had witnessed the way Merve Kavakci was hounded out of
Parliament — and even stripped of her Turkish nationality — after
her election in 1999, there was no underestimating the significance
of this development.
With the headscarf issue now largely defused, we can hope that tension
will decrease and the focus will turn to the contribution women can
make in the political arena and in public life, rather than on what
they choose to wear. The recent incident of the female TV presenter who
lost her job for showing too much cleavage has raised concerns that the
freedoms handed out to women — unfairly sidelined for too long — are
being taken away from others. Putting an end to the injustice that kept
covered women out of the public sphere satisfies the AKP’s constituency
and Turkey’s democrats, but in itself it doesn’t constitute proof of
the party’s support for the rights of individual women.
It also remains to be seen if the lifting of what was never a formal
ban will encourage the AKP to field more women candidates in the
upcoming local elections. Several of the party’s founding members were
women who, until now, could only be active in the background. Will
they play a more visible role in the future?
Another important sign of change, in a very different area, was evident
this weekend at Bogazici University, where the Hrant Dink Foundation
was hosting a conference on Islamized Armenians. One doesn’t have to
go back very far in time to remember the outcry that followed the
announcement in 2005 that the same university was planning to hold
a conference on the Ottoman Armenians. At the time, Cemil Cicek,
who is currently speaker of Parliament, accused the organizers of
“stabbing Turkey in the back.” The gathering had to be canceled and
it was eventually held, weeks later, at Istanbul Bilgi University —
an important threshold was crossed.
This time, no such controversy has erupted and the packed audience
showed that interest in that dark period of Turkey’s history has
grown considerably. The Armenian issue used to be mentioned mainly
when a foreign nation chose to recognize the genocide, triggering
a diplomatic spat with Turkey. In recent years, books like “My
Grandmother: A Memoir,” written by the Dink family lawyer Fethiye
Cetin, who revealed her grandmother’s long-hidden Armenian identity,
have turned the spotlight on personal stories.
In her introductory speech at the conference, Ayse Gul Altinay
mentioned that up to 200,000 Armenians may have survived the massacres
and integrated into Muslim Turkish, Kurdish or Arab society. This
means that today, three, or even four generations later, aside from
the members of the recognized Armenian minority in Turkey, millions
of people in this country have ancestors of Armenian origin, whether
they are aware of it or not. Now that the wall of silence has been
breached, more individual stories of tragedy, death and survival will
no doubt emerge, further broadening the space for debate.
Confronting the past, making it personal, will perhaps enable Turkey
to make peace with itself and reclaim its cultural diversity. If
progress in the Kurdish peace process is still slow, a degree of
distance allows us to spot green shoots of progress and an evolution
of public perceptions on this front too, even if they remain very
patchy and in need of careful nurturing.
NICOLE POPE (Cihan/Today’s Zaman) CIHAN