Considering AKP within the framework of the “women’s question”, 10 years ago, only one thing came to mind: the headscarf ban. Today, there is only one thing we think of again: the ban on abortion! In the first case, AKP was against the ban; and in the second, it is the prime minister himself who brought the ban into the agenda. He lifted the headscarf ban partially and de facto. However, he could not enable this freedom to have a legal safeguard. Working in the public sector with a headscarf is still subject to extremely arbitrary practices. It does not seem likely that a deputy with a headscarf can enter parliament in the forthcoming elections. As for the result of the ban on abortion, it remains to be seen.
These two bans and the relation of AKP with them seems worthy of examining not only in terms of the policy on women, but also with respect to observing the settlement of the party in the center.
For those who think AKP is the biggest enemy to women as a religious and reactionary party, which has not changed in the last 10 years, this development is amenable to being perceived as the government unmasking their “true face”. The political result of such an analysis is a steady enmity against the AKP. It is true that there are many factors to nourish this enmity. However, we are faced with a party in power that managed to raise its share of the votes with every election in a way unprecedented in the history of the Republic and, probably, it deserves more than the adjective “representative of the most reactionary, the most bigoted sections of society”. It deserves an analysis that is a bit more profound. It would not be possible to say a meaningful word on the political climate of Turkey without understanding why the voters, including many women, voted for this party and furthermore, why they wholeheartedly supported it.
The women of AKP
The demand to review and change the Laws on Political Parties and Elections in such a way as to ensure the participation of everyone in all sections of the political system has been voiced by the Turkey's feminist movement for years. They have not only voiced it. To my knowledge at least four drafts have been prepared; reports are regularly created and conveyed to political parties every year. This subject seems to be on the agenda of all the parties, however, no progress has yet been able to be achieved. The political parties are not internally democratic; the leaders have almost absolute hegemony, their words are taken as orders. This is especially the case for the AKP; even though it is the party with the widest (and probably the most active) organization. The AKP has also the most powerful leadership and therefore, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has the ultimate say on who gets elected to the decision-making bodies and features on the lists of deputies. This is also the determining framework of the area of maneuvering for the women in the party. There are few women among the founders of the party; few among these women seem to have the power and willingness to force the limits of this area of maneuver. For example Ayse Böhürler, who is one of the above-mentioned women, took “an oath of silence” after being silenced by the prime minister due to her opposing attitude in the discussion on the “promotion of a known torturer to the position of Assistant Director of the Police Department”. AKP deputies Nursuna Memecan and Mine Lök Beyaz also made opposing statements on this matter. Fatma Bostan Ünsal, one of the founders of the party, announced in a very courageous statement that she was against the ban on abortion. However, the effect of the female members of the party on the policy about women held by the party remains dubious, except for such individual statements. They maintain the position of declaring the conducted policies rather than determining them, including the case of Fatma Sahin, Minister of Family and Social Policies (as a matter of fact, she is a strong politician who has risen out of the party organization). We witnessed a highly desperate example of this during the process of the preparation of the Law on the Protection of Family and Prevention of Violence against Women. Ms. Sahin and her team prepared a draft law with women’s organizations as a result of lengthy meetings, discussions, negotiations, only to be amended overnight, and then it was up to them to explain and defend the text enacted by the Parliament.
Another serious handicap for the female party members is the fact that the headscarf ban has not been abolished entirely. Recalling the fact that the attempt by the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi) to remove the bans on headscarves triggered a process that led to the closure of the party, will probably help drive home the significant nature of this topic. This critical topic remained on the agenda of the AKP since the day it was founded, and it was among its most powerful ammunition during the first elections it participated. However, the AKP government did not lift the ban on headscarves even though it felt that it was strong enough to not flinch even in the face of risky events such as the collective resignation of the top administrators of the army during its rule. Instead, a de facto freedom was granted, especially in universities. The bans were lifted in municipalities and some public institutions with the initiatives taken by administrators. Even though they abstain from making an explicit statement about it, the women wearing headscarves within and outside the party mumble that this is a “divide and rule” tactic; this is a tactic that would enable the disqualification of some female party members, who are strong and who rose out of the organization, and who, therefore, have a high chance of acting in an autonomous fashion. Furthermore, some even mumble that in the context of the struggle among female party members, those who do not wear headscarves are not very enthusiastic about lifting the ban.
In spite of everything, the number of female AKP deputies, women acting in the party administration and working as administrators in the local organizations, is not small when compared to other parties. As a function of the high total number of their deputies, the number of their female deputies is also above all previous numbers: 45 (BDP implements the gender equality policy more effectively, therefore I do not include them in the “other parties” category).
The AKP perspective on equality
It should be stated straight away that AKP has no concept such as equality. Strangely, the arena where they come closest to talking about equality is class equality. (It is actually the only one!) Their way of doing this is reminiscent of the unforgettable cue in old Turkish movies: “Once there was a poor but proud young man! Do you remember him?” They have a strong tendency to imagine themselves as a group that, after having been oppressed, scorned and trampled upon, finally managed to rise up with justice being served. (This is normal for a generation that grew up with poems that said: “You have been in misery with your face down for so long/Rise up, Sakarya”!) The scope of “themselves” are subject to change. Sometimes, especially before elections, it expands to include almost all the inhabitants of Turkey, sometimes it includes the “ascetic members” of the party and at other times it includes only the Prime Minister. A separate article can be penned on the discourse of victimization of the AKP. However, what is important within the framework of our topic is that they can interpret equality only as the revenge for a long-lasting oppression. We’ve been witnessing a feeling of revenge in practices such as the detention of generals and former elites close to them as their houses were raided at dawn during the never-ending saga of the Ergenekon waves.
As for gender equality, “there is no such thing as equality between men and women” was expressed by the Prime Minister himself. The reasoning behind this is the different inherent natures of women and men etc. While saying that women and men were not equal, the AKP government still managed to enact some of the most egalitarian legal amendments in the history of the Republic: inclusion of sexual crimes in the crimes against the individual in the Penal Code (previously, they were deemed as crimes against the familial and societal order), criminalization of intra-marital rape and sexual harassment, binding virginity test to court decision, abolishment of the concept ‘head of the family’, amendment in the marital property law in favor of women, implementation of the principle of ‘equal pay for equal work’ in the labor code. For example, the Prime Ministry Circular issued in 2006 was an important text proclaiming that the state was a party to the prevention of domestic violence with all its institutions and showed the framework in which it would be implemented. Following this circular, 45 thousand policemen received training on domestic violence and gender equality and a recording system was set up at police stations. The training for public servants was extended to include the staff of the Religious Affairs Department, health institutions and even judges and prosecutors. The Ministry of Interior Affair, jointly with the United Nations, started to conduct the “Project for Women-Friendly Cities” prepared to enable local governments to draft and conduct policies that would take into account gender equality, and the Directorate for Local Governments, an extremely conservative organization (naturally, the conservativeness at stake here is worse than that of AKP), became involved in this project without too much complaint.
It seems to me that seeing and recognizing these developments as areas of negotiation and struggle constitute a more useful effort than “unmasking the party to reveal its true face”. On the other hand, one should keep in mind that there are limits to all these developments. A declaration signed by Erdogan summarizes nicely the perspective of the party on gender equality:
“On the Day of Struggle and Solidarity Against Violence Targeting Women, we, as men, believe that all sorts of violence against women is a fundamental violation of human rights, a public health issue that deeply wounds and weakens the society and that violence against women can never be legitimized based on any grounds such as strict customs and traditions. The women, who are our companions in life, our sisters, mothers and daughters to whom we entrust our future, are individuals having the same rights as men who form one half of this society. Therefore, we shall not be a partner in crime against women and we shall not stand witness to this. Let us stand hand in hand and end the violence against women. We are determined to do what is incumbent on us as men in struggling against violence against women; we stand by them, too.” (The Declaration titled ‘We Stand by Them’ prepared by the Commission for Equal Opportunities for Men and Women of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey.)
Ranging from the establishment of a “Commission for Equal Opportunities” rather than just “Equality” to the interpretation of the notion of rights merely within the framework of being oppressed and the emphasis on the detrimental effect of violence against women on the family, this text and the framework within which it was penned seems not to have anything to do with the concept of equality as portrayed by feminism. Therefore, it is necessary to assess all the legal amendments and public servant training in the AKP period within this framework. By the same token, the assessment should also be made in light of the undivided attention and caution provided by its own clientele. A crystallized example of this attention is to be found in the emphasis on a news article published in the newspaper Haber Türk on the speech by the prime minister where he purported to consider abortion a crime: “Why did you abolish adultery in the first place and enact a law on it? First you tell the woman that she can be with whomever she wants, and then you go and declare abortion prohibited!” (May, 29, 2012, HaberTürk Internet page readers’ comments).
The AKP policy on family
One cannot claim that the ideological line that family is “the founding stone of the society” was drawn up by the AKP; on the contrary, there has never been a government in power so far that did not adopt this line. However, an important feature of the AKP is that it raised the position of phrases such as “family is so important, it is the founding stone of our society” from being merely demagogical remarks to turn them into the basis of government policies. For example, the re-arrangement of the State Ministry in charge of Women to the Ministry for Family and Social Policies was not simply a symbolical action.
As we have seen in numerous examples ranging from the remark by Ali Babacan, who was the State Minister in charge of Economy during the first year of AKP rule, stating that female unemployment was “a good sign” to the recommendation by the prime minister that couples should have “at least three children”, this party has a heartfelt commitment to the concept of family. The family that they describe is a nuclear family with at least three children. Even though they do not particularly oppose the idea that women should work, they cannot possibly fail to envisage that women will indeed fall into the margins of working life after giving birth to three children. As a matter of fact, considering the family as a tool for social policy means a concrete acceptance of the idea that certain societal services will be given within the family (by the women, naturally). An interesting point here is that they envisage the provision of a specific fee for the services to be provided through families; for example, they find it more rational to “tackle” the care for the handicapped within the family, departing from the reasons why boarding facilities fail to be operated efficiently. Therefore, not only are they aware that family is not a bundle of love, but they also develop policies by accepting this fact as a given.
There is no political parallel for the wide and loving family picture in the election brochures and propaganda texts of the AKP. Even though they like to keep this picture as an ideal and have a look at it time and again, they know that the reality is different and they act upon this knowledge. This is the only way in which they can strip family out of its character as a demagogical motive and make it operational. A trend that became significant during the AKP period in terms of social spending is that these expenditures are made as if mediated by family (for critical texts on this topic, please see the publications by the Bosporus University, Social Policy Forum: www.spf.boun.edu.tr) and this is what I mean when I say the transformation of the family into an “operational” unit.
In the same vein, AKP seems to have come a long way in its determination not to leave family as a “matter of private space”. The number of children is but an example; as underlined by the discussions about the bans on abortion and C-section, the family policies are not only conducted by means of public spending, but tools are also being devised for direct intervention. Many signs ranging, from the re-organization of primary care health services in the form of the family physician structure to the formation of extremely sophisticated registration systems, demonstrate this fact to us.
Perhaps a re-assessment of the feminist policies such as the struggle against domestic violence within this framework might provide us with a different picture and it might pave the way for more interesting things to say on the “feminism” of the AKP. In the meantime, it is also useful to remember the central importance of the family policies of the AKP while analyzing its “feminism” as a development that is in parallel with the re-arrangement of the gender regime in the globalized world. The modern gender regime with which modern capitalism and the system of nations work in great harmony (the classical borders of the public space/private divide is a space the scorecard of this regime) is being replaced by the re-arrangement of the global world and new perspectives. An important aspect of this renewal is the body policies; it does not seem possible to grasp this, namely, new policy tools and ideological language within the discourse of the “backwardness of the AKP”.
AKP’s allergy to feminism and the party’s homophobia
Of course, one can mention the feminism of the AKP just as one can mention the state feminism of the Republic. However, it should not be overlooked that just as the Republic was allergic to feminism, the AKP also developed such an allergic reaction to them: “Dear brothers and sisters, if what we need is feminism; then it is us who can do it in the best way!”
While qualifying the pro-abortion stance as “feminist propaganda”, Erdogan probably sincerely believed that feminism was a lame idea of the kind that could be upheld by no sane women. This belief of his seems to be shared by the female members of the party, although I don’t know whether they are equally sincere. As far as I can see, they seem to be ashamed of being feminists although they do not lag behind the women in CHP, the other political party in the center. (There are few among the CHP members who call themselves “feminist” - but that’s another discussion) The speeches that start out: “I am not a feminist, but...” reflect this bashfulness, however, one cannot ignore that they also made attempts, which should be taken seriously, with the effect of their tendency towards political organization and strong capabilities for taking action. They did not submissively digest the threatening remarks by Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, the “tough guy” of their party that “female members of the AKP did not succumb to feminism”; they responded to him as allowed by their “manners”. Judging by the way in which the female members of the AKP defended their own position, one can easily say that they are ready for a “tidy”, adequately “well-mannered” feminism.
On the other hand, the topic that remains a taboo and cannot be proposed as a discussion point is homosexuality. LGBT rights form one of the sharpest redlines, not to say, the primary one for the AKP, even though it could not yet decide whether homosexuality was a disease or a sin. They had the tendency to dismiss this subject as silently as possible in the period when they entered the EU harmonization process in a more enthusiastic and rapid manner. We have seen clearly the LGBT policy of the party in the remark by Aliye Kavaf, State Minister in charge of Women, that homosexuality was a disease. It is obvious that homophobia is not peculiar to AKP. However, this seems to be the area that will give them the hardest time in their role as the builder in Turkey of the new gender regime to which they rapidly and easily adapted themselves.
Conclusion
We can summarize the women, family and body policies of the AKP neither within the framework of “backwardness and bigotry” nor as independent from the new policies on the global level. Furthermore, we are faced with an area that is not clearly delineated, consistent and holistic. It is an area that is fragmented and consisting of variable parts. We are dealing with a party in power that tries to assure the unity of these parts by telling certain ideological fables. And opponents need to do more than treat these fables as facts. What is required is to deconstruct the fable by starting with the family secrets known to everyone, not to forget the question of which desires, hopes and expectations of the women and men living in this society are met by the “big brother” crystallized in the persona of Erdogan and to progress by taking into account these facts and their mediators.
Endnote
*A quote from the public address of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Diyarbakir in June, 2012.