BY ISMET BERKAN
RADIKAL- This week Vatan's Rusen Çakir wrote about Bogazici University's Hakan Yylmaz observations about European Union Commissioner for Enlargement Olli Rehn's suggestion that we set up an ombudsman system to deal with the secularism issue.
A short quote from Yilmaz's well-written observations is as follows: 'The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is right to say that the state has the characteristic of secularism. But secularism hasn't been a characteristic peculiar to the state in recent years in Turkey, and now it's becoming a right for citizens, because during the course of performing their tasks, certain public officials - possibly local governors or officials from certain central administrations - convey to some that they would like them to comply with certain religious norms in return for or a certain service or that a certain public service would stop if certain religious norms are not followed. This is sometimes called 'neighborhood pressure' or 'hindering modern life.' In conclusion, there are certain complaints that people's freedom to not believe a religion or not abide by certain religious norms is restricted. At this point, we see that the secularism has been brought top-down and that it has become a right for citizens, beyond being a rule of the state. But there's no way of coping with the state's imposition of religious norms on people. As this imposition wasn't defined, it's not covered by the law. For example, it's an imposition that an enterprise owned by a municipality be banned from selling alcoholic drinks, and there's no judicial authority to prosecute this. For example, a teacher might favor religious students and gives higher grades to them and protect them.'
This is where the entire issue lies. As Yilmaz wrote, making people religious through the public or through public force or imposing a certain lifestyle through relatively softer methods is a problem for Turkey. Twenty-five years ago in Konya you could get a bottle of beer at any restaurant, but today you can't. I recently heard about how the last restaurant in Kayseri serving alcohol was pressured to stop. In Denizli, that is, in the Aegean region, a life without alcohol is being imposed, because the municipality won't issue new licenses to sell alcohol. I wonder how many alcohol licenses were given by Istanbul's district municipalities of Beykoz, Uskudar or Sariyer over the last four years.
Here's another quote from Yilmaz: 'The AKP argues in its defense that secularism is a situation peculiar to the state and that people can't be secular. In other words, it's still dealing with the classical understanding of secularism and it still hasn't realized how the violation of secularism as a citizens' right hurts them greatly. The point where the AKP and religious people come to a deadlock is that they consider being religious a normal thing and other attitudes to be abnormal and something to be tolerated. The entire problem comes from this.'
Personally, I don't need the AKP's tolerance, and I think and argue that nobody should need it. This is a state of law and we're all equal before the law under Article 10 of the Constitution. The law guarantees my right and freedom to believe in a religion and worship and also to not believe in a religion. But this is exactly the situation: the AKP is basically tolerating us. You can see this stance very clearly in certain statements made by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Education Ministry. Similarly, Erdogan asks and can ask, 'Do I interfere with your wearing a miniskirt?' as if he could if he wanted to, but he doesn't, because he's a democrat and a forgiving person.