Basından
Turkey parliament passes rights reform
The Washington Post
Published: Sunday, Aug. 4 2002
Turkey's parliament passed new legislation Saturday morning to abolish the death penalty and establish language rights for the Kurdish minority, keeping alive its bid to become the first Muslim member of the European Union.
ISTANBUL, Turkey — Turkey's parliament passed new legislation Saturday morning to abolish the death penalty and establish language rights for the Kurdish minority, keeping alive its bid to become the first Muslim member of the European Union.
The measures, which also relax prohibitions on public meetings and criticism of the powerful military and other state institutions, signal a watershed change in the way the country views itself, analysts and lawmakers said.
"Here, everything is based on the state, the existence of the state," said Bulent Akarcali, whose Motherland Party championed the reforms, which were approved by a comfortable margin after a marathon session. "This concept, this mentality, is changing." The founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, put the assertion of national identity before all else, and the country for eight decades has hewed to a course that subjugated individual and minority rights. In recent years the approach hit Turkey's 12 million ethnic Kurds hardest; the Kurds' desire to keep alive their own language has been equated with militant efforts to create a separate state.
Until the prospect of joining the EU arose, with its promise of economic advantage in exchange for the adoption of international standards for human rights, Kurdish advocates were being jailed for merely suggesting some of the very measures Turkish lawmakers voted into law.
Mehmet Ali Birand, a leading columnist, called the vote "very, very significant. It means the legacy of Ataturk policies is put aside. You accept the Kurdish reality. For the first time."
Kurdish advocates voiced approval of, but not satisfaction with, the measures, which allow the Kurdish language to be tutored and broadcast but do not authorize public schools to teach it.
"What I think is most significant is that a subject which has been a taboo for years is open to discussion," said Hasan Kaya, chairman of the Istanbul Kurdish Institute. "A forbidden language can hardly improve."
The Kurdish question also loomed over the vote that repealed the death penalty except in times of war. Turkey has had a moratorium on capital punishment and has not executed a prisoner in more than 10 years. Polls show that a majority of Turks accept a formal ban.
Debate was fractious nonetheless because the repeal meant that a captured Kurdish separatist leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who authorities say is responsible for 30,000 deaths during years of fighting in the country's now largely quiescent southeast, will not be executed. The effective reprieve for Ocalan, head of the outlawed Kurdish Workers' Party, or PKK, prompted cries of treason from members of the Nationalist Action Party.
But the country's major news outlets celebrated passage of the reform package. "Europe, we're coming!" read the headline in the nationwide daily Milliyet.
EU membership, if it comes at all, however, remains at least six years away, and more probably eight, experts say. Today's vote was prompted by a December deadline the EU had set for Turkey to prove it is serious about making changes, particularly cleaning up its checkered human rights record and guaranteeing cultural freedom, especially for the Kurds.
Although almost entirely part of Asia geographically, Turkey, a member of NATO, has been oriented toward the West since its centuries as the heart of the Ottoman Empire, which extended into present-day Austria.
Turkey's bid for EU membership is strongly supported by the United States, which views Turkey as a useful secular, Western-leaning nation with a Muslim majority and as an example to other Islamic countries.
"Just think, through Turkey the EU will be represented at the Organization of Islamic Countries,"
