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 Professor Vahit Bicak, former chairman of the Directorate of Human Rights of the Prime Ministry, soon became disillusioned with the AKP. He told WPR, "I do not think that the AKP had and has any real and sincere policy on minority and human rights issues."
(Patrick Wrigley | Bio | 21 Nov 2008 World Politics Review) ISTANBUL, Turkey -- This past July, the president of Turkey, Abdullah Gul, spoke to an assembled crowd of Shiite Turks, known as Alevis. The speech, calling for unity and acceptance of minorities, came less than a month after Gul\\\'s Islamist-oriented Justice and Development Party (AKP) was spared closure by the constitutional court for anti-secular activity. Much of the Turkish press hailed the moment as a new beginning, the start of a more inclusive and tolerant atmosphere in the country. However, three months later, with the Kurdish dominated southeast alight with riots and the Alevis holding a 50,000-strong demonstration in Ankara in early November, the vision of a multi-ethnic, multiconfessional Turkey has been left in tatters.
In some regards, this is nothing new. The Kurds and Alevis can point to a long history of massacres, assassinations and political disappearances targeting their communities. However, Hakan Yavuz, an expert on Turkish Islam and associate professor of political science at the University of Utah, claims, \\\"Alevis have become even more excluded within the last decade. That\\\'s why they are searching for new policies to get recognition and representation. The state continues to see them as alien or foreign.\\\"
Indeed, while the AKP speaks of building a broad coalition behind a tolerant, Muslim democracy, critics argue that little has changed, with minorities still suffering at the hands of the state. Professor Vahit Bicak, former chairman of the Directorate of Human Rights of the Prime Ministry, soon became disillusioned with the AKP. He told WPR, \\\"I do not think that the AKP had and has any real and sincere policy on minority and human rights issues.\\\"
The Kurds have often grabbed the international headlines as a result of the ongoing war in the southeast. However, in many ways the Alevis serve as a better illustration of Turkey\\\'s minority rights progress. Turkish Alevis, who number approximately 11 million, or 15 percent of the population, according to estimates based on a U.S. National Security Council report, belong to a syncretic religion aligned with the Shiite branch of Islam. The community has consistently been seen as a threat to the state by secular nationalists and Islamists alike, arousing suspicion for their heterodoxy and also for their traditional alignment with left leaning parties. With the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) bringing a particular brand of Sunni Islam to government and the simmering tension of nationalism again coming to the surface, the position of Alevis remains crucial and yet marginalized.
Indeed, despite the lengths that state institutions will go to in order to defend secularism, modern Turkey has never been truly multiconfessional. Yavuz says, \\\"The secularism of Turkey is very different from the secularism of the U.K. or Germany. . . . The Turkish state has always been a Sunni Muslim state but it wants to be secular as well.\\\" The country may well have embarked on an EU-inspired democratization of certain aspects of society, but Alevis, as well as other minorities such as Kurds, still feel like second-class citizens. In Turkey, secularism has rarely equaled pluralism.
The main points of contention for the Alevi community remain an unequal distribution of state funds for places of worship, which excludes Alevi Cem houses, and a school curriculum that insists upon religious lessons espousing the creed of Sunni Islam. Although Alevi foundations are supporting court cases against these measures, the future looks uncertain.
But while some Alevis are marginalized on religious grounds, the wider ethnic community suffers for its attachment to secularism. \\\"Alevis are the main social base for the secular nature of Turkey. Alevis are very adamant on the headscarf issue . . . [they] do not want any symbolic representation of religious identity in the public sphere,\\\" argues Yavuz. However, \\\"There has been a gradual Islamization of the state in Turkey. Alevis are [therefore] still a suspect group,\\\" he says.
Distrusted by the increasingly pious Sunni Muslim majority, on the one hand, and by a purportedly secular state premised on a singular national identity on the other, Alevis argue that they are caught between a rock and a hard place. However, Dogan Bermek, president of the Federation of Alevis, remains optimistic that the community will take its rightful place in the social and political life of the country.
\\\"That will happen with the emergence of a new political movement in the country. . . . What I hope is that there will be a new liberal activity emerging from political parties . . . and also liberal associations. The liberals and secularists have to find a way to get together on certain ideas and certain principles,\\\" he says.
If this happens, it will not only be the Alevis that benefit, but the country\\\'s ideal of political pluralism as well.
Patrick Wrigley is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul, Turkey. He writes extensively on Turkey, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. |
