Turkey: Secular Turks Face Growing Discrimination -- Report

A study documenting how non-practicing Turks feel forced to conform to a former-Islamist government's conservative values if they want government jobs or promotions has sparked heated debate, revealing once again the depth of divisions in this secular Muslim country.

The first study to provide backing for secular Turks' fears that political Islam is influencing their lives, the report, titled Being Different in Turkey, clashes with popular characterizations of Anatolia as a font of religious and ethnic harmony. Based on lengthy interviews with 401 people in 12 provincial towns across the country, it catalogues day-to-day acts of intolerance. Schoolchildren tell of pressure from classmates to fast during Ramadan; civil servants say getting food in staff canteens on fasting days is now impossible; Kurds in nationalist Turkish areas describe how they hang up on their non-Turkish speaking mothers, so as not to be overheard speaking Kurdish in public; and there has been a 13 percent drop in the number of bars and supermarkets licensed to sell alcohol since 2005.

Binnaz Toprak, the social scientist who ran the project admits that -- with the exception of alcohol bans and the growing presence of religion in schools -- much of the evidence she and her three colleagues collected may have no direct link to the policies of the governing Justice and Development Party, or AKP.

Indeed, the claim made by Toprak and many of her study's readers that it shows growing conservatism is questionable. Instead, it does something much more interesting. It analyzes in detail the social effects of a political culture based on patronage, rather than merit.

"Ideally, states should be equidistant from all citizens and provide equal service to all," Toprak says. "Of course none are ideal, but while governments in the United States or the United Kingdom change only the top level of the bureaucracy, in Turkey political change is reflected down to the lowest ranks."

She cites evidence from the report showing how membership of an Islamic-minded civil servants' union has swollen since the AKP came to power in 2002. Back then, Memur-Sen had 42,000 members. In 2008, it had 315,000. Over the same period membership of other opposition unions has remained steady.

Patronage, Toprak says, leaves people feeling bound to the government for all sorts of reasons -- their jobs, their business contracts, and so on. It also helps create an atmosphere where citizens learn to bend with the prevailing ideological wind. "One of the most striking impressions we garnered from the survey was of a new, strange kind of insincerity," Toprak says. Shopkeepers who don't pray close their shops during Friday prayers. Businessmen buy copies of pro-government newspapers. Others pretend to fast in their home town and drive out of town to indulge themselves.

"Several towns we visited had the same phrase for this," Toprak continued. "Crossing the bridge." She added that numerous respondents joked to the survey team that "if a left-wing party comes to power, the same people will start hauling out anecdotes about how their granddad was a communist."

Her report ends on a much gloomier note. "What appears clear from this limited survey is that Turkey is neither in a position to complete its European membership bid, nor in possession of a functioning liberal democracy."

Conservative circles, and some liberals, have strongly criticized the work of Toprak and her team. The study was conducted with support from the Open Society Institute (OSI) and Bosphorus University. Another chief target for criticism is OSI's founder, George Soros. [EurasiaNet operates under the auspices of OSI].

Writing in the pro-AKP Yeni Safak, liberal-minded columnist Ayse Bohurler compares the report to "colonialist studies of indigenous people." "The local inhabitants are treated like foreigners," she says.

While Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's spokesman has declined to comment on the report, a senior AKP official denied on December 21 that the party exerted pressure or discriminated against the non-devout Turks. "The picture presented in the study does not reflect the realities of Turkey," Nihat Ergun said. "Even in our party, we have women in headscarves working alongside women who do not cover themselves and no one has ever complained of any pressure."

Such complaints are not entirely unfounded. Non-partisan Turks all admit patronage and intolerance are common to all Turkish parties. More importantly, critics say the report, which lists complaints of interviewees, looks more like investigative journalism than a work of scholarship. "It looks like something you'd get if you sent correspondents from [the authoritarian secularist daily] Cumhuriyet on an Anatolian road trip," quipped Emre Akoz, a liberal columnist for the daily Sabah.

But Rusen Cakir, an expert on Turkish Islam, nonetheless finds the vehemence of conservative responses to the study significant. "They used to have the monopoly on being oppressed in Turkey," he says, referring to on-going university headscarf bans. "This study broke that. Now they are looking for pretexts to hide themselves from that fact."

Once lionized by conservative media outlet for her earlier survey work, Binnaz Toprak denies accusations of partiality. "The trouble with this country is that all camps -- liberal intellectuals, leftists, Islamists -- talk among themselves rather than sitting down with other groups to try to thrash out a rational solution to problems," she says.

"Our aim was to try to persuade all sides that what this country needs is consensus, not a new generation of politicians trying to impose their life-style choices on everyone."

It is early days yet, but liberal commentator Yavuz Baydar doubts the study will serve that purpose. "The gap between non-secular and secular in Turkey is widening," he says. "Because of its shortcomings, there is a serious risk the report will end up being used as a weapon in the ideological war."