ANKARA, 29 October 2004 — Despite a threatened boycott by ruling party lawmakers, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer again barred women with Islamic head scarves from tomorrow’s official reception to mark modern Turkey’s founding and added athletes embroiled in doping and sex scandals to this year’s black list.
Unmoved by the uproar he caused last year when he barred women wearing head scarves, the staunchly secularist Sezer again refused to invite to the presidential palace wives of Justice and Development Party (AKP) legislators wearing what is seen by many as a symbol of political Islam.
The majority of the 368 AKP deputies are expected to boycott the reception, AKP sources said yesterday, which is the top event on Ankara’s social calendar and this year marks the 81st anniversary of the modern Turkish republic.
Women wearing the head scarf have in the past attended receptions at the presidential palace, but Sezer introduced his stringent dress code for the first time last year after the AKP, a conservative party rooted in a now-banned Islamist movement, was voted into power.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose wife Emine also covers her head, was spared the embarrassment of turning up alone again thanks to a scheduled trip to Rome for the signing ceremony of the new European Union Constitution.
The wives of most AKP members wear the head scarf, which is banned from universities and government offices in Turkey, a mainly Muslim but strictly secular country. In contrast, AKP legislators’ wives who shun the scarf were invited, as were women legislators and wives of deputies from the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), who never wear the controversial kerchief.
Outraged by the ban, several AKP deputies said they had returned their invitations to the president in protest.
“It is not possible to understand this negative stance the president has against the head scarf, which the majority of women in this country wear,” one deputy, Mustafa Nuri Akbulut, said in a brief letter to Sezer.
Snubbed wives also joined the protest. “I too would have liked to attend the celebration... I condemn your desire to turn the republic into a regime that belongs only to those who do not cover their heads,” Sabahat Yagci, the wife of AKP deputy Ziyattin Yagci, wrote in a letter to the president, seen by AFP. Her husband said: “I will not attend because I am against discrimination.”
Sezer’s guest list this year appeared to send not only a message of secularism but also of ethics in sports.
The president snubbed the first Turkish woman to win an Olympic gold medal, weightlifter Nurcan Taylan, after her record-breaking performance in Athens this summer was overshadowed by claims of sexual harassment against her coach.
All other medal winners from the Athens Olympics were invited to the reception. Also off the list was runner Sureyya Ayhan, the reigning European women’s 1500 meters champion, who missed the Games and is under investigation for fixing a doping test.
