12 September 2004Jonny Dymond in Istanbul
Outside a courthouse in Bakirkoy, an unfashionable neighbourhood of Istanbul, a dozen or so women gathered in the brittle autumn sunshine. They had come to demonstrate at the first hearing in the trial of the killers of Guldunya Tore, a 22-year-old woman shot dead in the city in February.
Guldunya had fled her home in Bitlis, south-east Turkey, after she fell pregnant to her cousin's husband. Her family sent her to live with relatives in Istanbul. Soon after her child was born she was shot in the street and left for dead, but she survived. In hospital she asked for police protection. It was refused. Later, gunmen burst into her room and killed her.
Her two brothers are charged with her murder in an 'honour killing'. Friday was the first day of their trial.
For the demonstrators the link between Guldunya's murder and a proposed adultery law, due to be voted upon in the Turkish parliament on Tuesday, is terrifying. They believe the criminalisation of adultery will effectively legitimise honour killings. The government gives every impression of being baffled by the uproar that has followed its proposed law. But this week, as news of it began to leak out into the international media, ministers began to feel the heat.
Asked what he thought of the new law, the EU's Enlargement Commissioner, Gunther Verheugen, gave the Eurocrats' version of 'no comment'. Standing next to the Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, he was in the capital Ankara on his final trip to Turkey before the EU Commission gives its verdict on the country's once appalling human rights record. When the commissioner met the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an official revealed he'd told him to dump the proposed law. Europe, he said, was different when it came to these matters.
There is a dark irony surrounding these events, because this government has done more than any other to bring Turkey to the edge of EU membership. It forced the military to relinquish privileged positions within government. It applied pressure to persuade the Turkish Cypriots and the military to accept a compromised Cyprus reunification plan.
The state broadcaster TRT was even made to broadcast Kurdish language programming.
All of this took considerable nerve, which makes the move over adultery hard to fathom, coming as it does less than a month before the Commission's report.
Rusen Cakir, a journalist who has written extensively on the Islamist movement, believes the governing Justice and Development party (AK) has miscalculated: 'They couldn't foresee that the Europeans would show such a big reaction. If they thought it would be taken very seriously they wouldn't have done it.'
As with previous proposed reforms on headscarf regulations and religious schools, Cakir believes the adultery law is an attempt by AK to prop up its core constituency, the 20 per cent of its voters who are religious conservatives.
The logical thing to do now might be to look for a tactical retreat, but most people think it is too late for that. 'If they take a step back they'll lose prestige in the country,' said Cakir. 'And if they take a step back this will be because of the EU, not because of the people's reaction.'
'The problem is,' said Soli Ozel, Professor of International Relations at Istanbul's Bilgi University, 'that it gives ammunition to those [in the EU] who say "Turkey is not like us".'
Ozel is not a fan of the proposed law: 'If we want to join the EU we have to accept that it is a set of norms, not just political norms, but also about the rights of the individual, equality between men and women, and the sanctity of private life.'
Turkey's poor may adore the AK - the latest opinion poll gives the party more than half of the vote - but the secular middle class, the bureaucrats and the military fear it. They don't believe the government has embraced secularism. Every time the government moves on a religious issue they cry foul, with much of the media behind them.
Nimet Cubukcu, 39, an AK party founder, helped draft the new penal code and sits on parliament's constitutional committee. 'Of course, Turkey's image is important,' she said. 'But we have to remember who we are and what we are. Our law is not degrading people's human rights and the punishment is not degrading people's honour. The punishment will either be money, a fine or imprisonment. We are not talking about stoning anyone here.'
One poll suggests eight out of 10 Turks think adultery should be a criminal offence. Many of the reforms of recent years have passed over the heads of the people, coming down from the EU to the government. Now debate has been joined. Europe may not hear quite what it expected.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5014036-102275,00.html
