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TURKEY - LIFT OF GENERATIONS-OLD BAN
ON ISLAMIC HEADSCARF
Reuters - October 8, 2013
ANKARA — Turkey lifted a ban on women wearing the Islamic head scarf in state institutions on Tuesday, ending a generations-old restriction as part of a package of reforms the government says are meant to improve democracy.
The
ban, whose roots date back almost 90 years to the early days of the Turkish
Republic, has kept many women from joining the public work force, but
secularists see its abolition as evidence of the government pushing an Islamic
agenda.
The new rules, which will not apply to the judiciary or the military, were
published in the Official Gazette and take immediate effect in the majority
Muslim but constitutionally secular country.
"A regulation that has hurt many young people and
has caused great suffering to their parents, a dark period, is coming to an
end," Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told a meeting of his AK Party, which
has its roots in Islamist politics.
The debate around the head scarf goes to the heart of
tensions between religious and secular elites, a major fault line in Turkish
public life.
Erdogan's critics see his AK Party as seeking to erode
the secular foundations of the republic built on the ruins of an Ottoman
theocracy by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923.
His supporters, particularly in Turkey's pious
Anatolian heartlands, say Erdogan is simply redressing the balance and
restoring freedom of religious expression to a Muslim majority.
"There was a witch hunt for civil servants with a
head scarf," said Safiye Ozdemir, a high-school teacher in Ankara who for
years had to remove her head scarf at work against her wishes, but had started
to defy the ban in recent months.
"Today it became clear that we've been right. So
we are happy, and we are proud. It's a decision that came in very late, but at
least it came, thank God."
INTRUSIVENESS
The lifting of the ban, based on a cabinet decree from
1925 when Ataturk introduced a series of clothing reforms meant to banish overt
symbols of religious affiliation for civil servants, is part of a
"democratization package" unveiled by Erdogan last week.
The long-awaited package - in large part aimed at
bolstering the rights of Turkey's Kurdish community - included changes to the
electoral system, the broadening of language rights and permission for villages
to use their original Kurdish names.
An end to state primary school children reciting the
oath of national allegiance at the start of each week, a deeply nationalistic
vow, also took effect on Tuesday.
But Erdogan's opponents have found little to suggest he
is curbing what they see as his puritanical intrusiveness into private life,
from his advice to women on the number of children they should have to his
views on tobacco and alcohol.
They leapt on the dismissal on Tuesday of a television
presenter - after she was criticized by AK Party deputy chairman Huseyin Celik
for wearing a revealing evening dress - as evidence that the government's
tolerance went in only one direction.
"These policies ... show not only the government's
attitudes to women but also its understanding of freedoms," said Sezgin
Tanrikulu, deputy head of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP),
which was founded by Ataturk.
"There are countries which interfere in the
outfits worn by television presenters, but in those countries we can't talk
about democracy," he said in a statement.
Celik dismissed such criticism, emphasizing that he had
not specifically named the television channel or presenter involved.
"As an individual, a TV viewer or a politician, it
is my right and freedom of expression to express my opinion," he said on
his Twitter account. "To exploit my comments by saying it is intervention
in lifestyles is malicious."
(Writing by Nick Tattersall and Humeyra Pamuk; Editing by Mark Heinrich)