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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Sep. - 6 Oct. 1999 Issue No. 449 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 Sep. - 6 Oct. 1999 Issue No. 449
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Scarf battle rages on
By Gareth JenkinsMerve Kavakci last week suffered another blow in her bid to become the first woman to wear a head scarf to sit in the Turkish parliament when the country's Supreme Court rejected her appeal to overturn a ruling of 15 May this year stripping her of Turkish citizenship.
"She has herself admitted that she took American citizenship without notifying the authorities," read the court's ruling. "As a result, we find no reason to reverse the Council of Ministers' decision to revoke her Turkish citizenship." The decision also de facto prevents Kavakci from sitting in parliament.
"The Electoral Law and Turkish Constitution are quite clear," said Parliamentary Speaker Yildirim Akbulut. "Only Turkish citizens can become members of parliament. If somebody loses their Turkish citizenship then they are automatically barred from being a member of parliament. So Merve Kavakci is not currently a member of parliament."
On 18 April this year Kavakci, a 31-year-old US-educated computer engineer, was elected as an Islamist Virtue Party (VP) member of parliament for Istanbul. In the run-up to the election Kavakci had campaigned almost exclusively on her right to wear a head scarf. But on 2 May, when she attempted to attend the swearing in ceremony of the new parliament wearing a head scarf, noisy protests by secularist MPs forced her to leave before she could take the oath.
The incident has made Kavakci a heroine to many devout head-scarfed women, but triggered a furious response from the Turkish establishment, for whom wearing a head scarf in a public institution is an implicit assault on the secular nature of the Turkish state. Turkish President Suleiman Demirel even accused Kavakci of being an "agent provocateur working for radical Islamic states".
Kavakci also became the target of an aggressive smear campaign in the secular Turkish press. Less than a week after the parliamentary incident, journalists discovered that on 5 March this year, in the middle of her election campaign, Kavakci had been granted US citizenship and, in what now looks to have been a fatal error, failed to comply with the legal requirement to inform the Turkish authorities. For the secular establishment, it was too good an opportunity to miss. Revoking citizenship usually takes several months. For Kavakci, the process was completed within two days.
The announcement by the Supreme Court upholding the decision to strip Kavakci of her citizenship has been angrily condemned by her supporters as being politically motivated. Kavakci's political mentor, VP member of parliament Nazli Ilicak, has warned that the struggle is far from over and that the party will find some way of enabling Kavakci to take her seat in parliament.
"Merve is a very pleasant, attractive woman. She has lots of suitors," wrote Ilicak in her column in the Islamist daily, Yeni Safak. "Why shouldn't she marry? If she does marry then she will become a Turkish citizen. The solution is that simple."
But potential suitors are likely to find that the Turkish establishment will not allow Kavakci to slip into a life of peaceful domesticity. Kavakci already faces charges of inciting religious hatred in a speech she made in Chicago in 1997 at a conference organised by the Islamic Association of Palestine, when she allegedly called for an armed struggle to establish an Islamic state in Turkey. On Monday, Huseyin Eken, the head of No 2 State Security Court in Ankara, announced that Kavakci's speech in Chicago would be cited in a similar case against five other Islamists, all of them, like Kavakci, former leading members of the VP's predecessor, the now banned Welfare Party. If convicted, the five face the death penalty.
