There is no doubt that the constitution written after the 1980 military coup opened a bizarre page in Turkish history by preventing female students with headscarves from attending public university. But Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has been in power for more than a decade now. And it is getting really tiresome to hear him link every issue to that wrong action, forcing the civilian population who are not AKP constituents to feel individually responsible.
Speaking today [June 11] at his party’s weekly parliamentary group meeting, Erdogan accused those who have not been able to defeat him at the ballot box of trying to find a new way, through the Gezi Park protests, to defeat him. “Although the Gezi Park protests are presented as being innocent … the truth is they’re really far from it,” he said. Erdogan is convinced that there is a foreign plot, in which the international media is playing a significant role, trying to cut short his achievements and therefore Turkey’s development in its democracy and economy.
“I want youth, especially, to understand this. We … as individuals, and as political generations, have passed through some difficult periods,” he said, addressing Istanbul’s Gezi Park protesters. “Many of our people’s lives have been darkened because of their beliefs. Why? In a country whose population is 99% Muslim, our girls could not go to universities with their headscarves. They were forced to go abroad for education. … Does a girl have no right to education because she wears a headscarf? Won’t she get educated? As a father who has gone through this [experience] I know this well.”
What the prime minister does not know is that those protesters at Gezi Park and elsewhere would not disagree with him on this point. Erdogan is giving the Gezi Park protests a meaning they do not have. “These protesters don’t care about freedom as they’re stepping on the freedoms of others,” he said, apparently forgetting all the protests held for decades after Friday prayers in condemnation of those then in power. The government then, although its legitimacy could have been open to question, did not use such force to disperse the protesters.
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