BY BILAL CETIN
VATAN- The Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been the ruling party for more than five years. In addition, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been the prime minister for nearly five years. The AKP is sensitive about the headscarf issue and has been promising to solve this issue since 2002, when it first ran for office. But there hasn't been any solution, because solving the issue isn't as easy as it seems. There is a high risk of tension and even crisis. The AKP has made a few moves but each time it saw the lack of social and institutional consensus, it beat a hasty retreat. But now, for the first time, Erdogan seems to be very determined. For a few days, he has been hinting that even if you call headscarves a symbol, the ban at universities will be lifted. In other words, there will be a constitutional change to end the ban.
The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) has been wanting the ban ended for a long time. Just like Erdogan, MHP leader Devlet Bahceli wants the ban lifted and the issue solved without any tension or conflict. The only disagreement between them is this: Erdogan thinks that people should be allowed to wear it, even if it's a symbol, whereas Bahceli thinks it shouldn't be allowed to be used as a political symbol due to sensitivities about secularism. In addition, Bahceli thinks that the AKP's initiatives to solve the headscarf issue are insincere and that it's only using this issue as a political tool.
So yesterday the MHP took action on this issue. It proposed a constitutional amendment, saying that if the AKP is sincere, the change should be made to end the wrangling over the issue. The MHP's solution is very simple. It says a clause on `presenting all kinds public services and benefiting from them' should be added to Article 10 of the Constitution, which is on the principle of equality before the law. In other words, all citizens will be able to benefit from all sorts of public services equally, and thus students wearing headscarves will be able to benefit from this service equally, as higher education is a also a public service. But this doesn't seem likely to overturn a 1989 Constitutional Court decision establishing the basis of the ban, because the ruling says nothing about the principle of `equality before the law or benefiting equally from public services.' In upholding the ban, the court directly referred to the principle of secularism and Articles 2 and 24, where this principle is stated.
Turkey will be discussing this issue for a while longer with non-governmental organizations, lawyers and universities. Most importantly, government agencies will become parties to this discussion. Actually they started doing this yesterday. The Supreme Court of Appeals' chief public prosecutor issued a statement criticizing the push to end the ban. He branded the MHP and AKP efforts as `activities aiming to alter the republic's secular character.' In other words, he thinks that these parties are violating the Constitution. Even if the way seems simple, it won't be easy to end the headscarf ban. Yesterday came the prosecutor's harsh criticism. Tomorrow this might be followed by other institutions. Even certain institutions whose intervention is never desired might criticize this as well.