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Ozkok: “The secular, democratic and unitary |
General Hilmi Ozkok, Turkey’s army chief of staff, last month expressed his displeasure at prime minister Abdullah Gul’s interference in army policy towards Islamist officers. In a speech he made at the military’s annual party for the media (Islamist journalists are not invited) Ozkok said Gul’s attitude would “indubitably encourage those who got mixed up in recidivist [meaning Islamic fundamentalist] activities”.
This was not AKP’s first brush with the military since its election victory. Earlier, the generals had vetoed the appointment of an Islamist university rector as education minister. They also persuaded the party leadership that electing an ex-officer expelled from the forces for religious reasons as chairman of the Meclis defence committee was not a good idea.
These clashes, though, are the exception rather than the rule. Overall the AKP leadership, in particular party leader Tayyip Erdogan, has bent over backwards not to upset the army. The generals overthrew Turkey’s first Islamist government in 1977 and Erdogan and his senior colleagues know that they will not hesitate to do so again if they detect the beginning of a process of Islamization of the government.
“There are some things that the generals will not tolerate,” says Sedat Ergin, who is one of the few journalists with access to the top brass in the military. “For instance, they will not tolerate women in tesettür in universities or government offices. And they will not stand for civil servants taking half the day off to go to the mosque and thereby make Friday a de facto holiday.”
Tesettür consists of a raincoat-like garment worn by pious women, reaching almost to the toes, and a headscarf that hangs low over the forehead and covers the neck and ears. For the secular establishment it has come to be regarded as the uniform of political Islam. Laws have been passed to ban it from universities, government offices and other public arenas.
Bulent Arinc, the Meclis speaker and an AKP hardliner, shocked Turkey when he took his tesettür-clad wife to the airport to see off president Necdet Sezer, who was going abroad on an official visit.
The generals took their revenge when Ozkok and the other service chiefs paid the mandatory ceremonial visit to the Meclis to congratulate Arinc on his election as speaker. They walked in, sat down, refused to take refreshments, got up and left. The whole thing took four minutes. Everyone knew why the visit was so short.
The next time Arinc went to the airport to wave farewell to the president he went alone.
Although the army has not declared war on the AKP, it is definitely on high alert. AKP will bend or break because secularism is a matter on which the army will not bargain.
“The Turkish armed forces naturally have fundamental and legitimate values that they will never allow to become a matter of debate,” said Ozkok in his prepared speech to the Turkish media on January 8. “The secular, democratic and unitary structure of the Turkish republic are subjects on which we will never compromise.”
