ANKARA, 6 June 2008 — Turkey’s top court yesterday annulled a law allowing women to wear Islamic head scarves in universities on grounds it violates secularism, in a major blow for the prime minister and his Islamist-rooted party.
In a brief statement after a seven-hour session, the 11-judge tribunal said it scrapped the law because it ran counter to constitutional provisions, which say Turkey is a secular republic and that this principle is unalterable.
The head scarf amendment, pushed through by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), was cited by the country’s chief prosecutor as a key piece of evidence in his pending bid to outlaw the party on charges that it is covertly seeking to replace the secular order with an Islamist regime.
The ruling is largely seen as an indication that the Constitutional Court will also go against the AKP when it rules on whether to ban it and bar 71 party officials, among them Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, from politics.
The AKP, the moderate offshoot of a banned Islamist movement, pushed the amendment through Parliament in February despite fierce objections that the change was a threat to the strict separation of state and religion.
The AKP argued that the head scarf ban — imposed after a 1980 military coup — violates freedom of conscience and the right to education, but the main opposition party immediately asked the Constitutional Court to abolish the law on the grounds that it was an affront to the secular system.
The Constitutional Court has in the past twice ruled against moves to lift the on-campus ban on the head scarf. The ban has been upheld by the Council of State, Turkey’s top administrative court, as well as the European Court of Human Rights.
Hard-line secularists — among them the army, the judiciary and academics — see the headscarf as a symbol of defiance against secularism, a basic tenet of the 84-year-old republic. They say that easing the restriction in universities will put pressure on women to cover up and pave the way for the lifting of a similar ban in high schools and government offices.
The AKP rejects charges of being anti-secular and says that it has disowned its Islamist roots and embraced Turkey’s bid to join the European Union. But it also maintains that rigid interpretations of secularism in Turkey breach religious freedoms.
Opponents argue that moves such as allowing the Islamic head scarf in universities and banning alcohol sales in restaurants run by AKP municipalities, coupled with rhetoric in favor of broader religious freedoms, indicate a secret Islamist agenda. The Constitutional Court is expected to rule on the bid to ban the AKP in autumn.
Meanwhile, Turkey’s military is cooperating with Iran by sharing information and coordinating strikes against PKK guerrillas in northern Iraq, a senior Turkish general said yesterday. “We haven’t done it (coordinated strikes) for one or two months but we would do it if necessary,” Gen. Ilker Basbug, head of the land forces and the second most powerful man in the Turkish military, told reporters at a security conference.
The Turkish military has regularly attacked Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebel positions this year in the mountains of northern Iraq, where several thousands are believed to be holed up. Turkish troops conducted a large-scale incursion across the border in February.
Iranian forces have often clashed in Iraqi border areas with rebels from the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), an offshoot of the PKK. Analysts say PJAK has bases in northern Iraq from where they operate against Iran.
The European Union and the United States are keen for NATO member Turkey, which says it is defending itself against a terrorist organization, to limit its attacks in northern Iraq in order to avoid destabilizing Iraq and the wider region.
“This terrorist group has taken advantage of the weakened Iraqi government to attack Turkey from northern Iraq. And we ... (work) against this terrorist organization and when necessary we do so inside Iraq,” Turkish President Abdullah Gul told reporters during a visit to Japan.
“But I would like to stress that we are only targeting this terrorist organization,” Gul said. Turkey has been accused of seeking to use the PKK’s presence in northern Iraq as a pretext to undermine Iraq’s largely autonomous Kurdish region.
The PKK, considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, took up arms against the Turkish state in 1984 with the aim of establishing an ethnic homeland in the mainly Kurdish southeast of Turkey. An estimated 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict.
