Turks protest headscarf ban plans

A woman shouts pro-secular slogans as she waves a national flag with a picture of Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, in front of his mausoleum in Ankara on Saturday. PHOTO: AP

More than 100,000 Turks took to the streets on Saturday to protest against government plans to lift an Islamic headscarf ban at universities and to defend the country's strong secular tradition.

Protesters called on the government to resign as they gathered at the mausoleum of modern Turkey's founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a symbol of secularism in the overwhelmingly Muslim country.

Military authorities who manage the mausoleum said 126,500 people demonstrated.

"I am very angry -- not against veiled women but against those who want to cover the republic's values with a veil," said novelist Sevgi Ozel, who was among the protesters.

Cemil Yasavul, 46, said she would "defend secularism until the last drop of my blood ... It is our most precious value."

Turkey's Islamist-rooted ruling party submitted to parliament last week a draft amendment to allow the Islamic headscarf in universities, making good on a six-year-old electoral promise. It will be voted on this week.

The reform was agreed to after weeks of bargaining between Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP).

The two parties easily have the two-thirds parliamentary majority required to amend the Constitution, but debate over the potentially explosive issue is far from over.

Defenders of the country's strict secularism, including the army and senior judges, see the headscarf as a symbol of defiance against the system.

Leading Turkish academics on Friday also warned that the country's secular system was under a "serious threat."

The chairman of a university oversight board, Mustafa Akaydin, said some women academics were already considering boycotting classes if the bill is passed.

"We are concerned that universities will plunge into a chaotic environment and opposing groups will start clashing with each other," he said.

But Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan defended the proposal on Saturday as a necessary reform that could further the country's bid to join the EU.

"The controversy that has arisen in recent days in Turkey unfortunately weakens, for the most part, Turkey's image abroad," the minister told reporters, according to Anatolia news agency.

"Turkey is a country that must move forward in the area of rights and liberties," he said. "Turkey is a country that is obliged to carry out political reforms to arrive at full membership in the European Union."

Erdogan had promised before his first electoral victory in 2002 that the "unfair [headscarf] ban will be abolished," but is in a position to deliver only now -- thanks to his party's solid re-election win in July.

A former Islamist whose wife and daughters wear the Islamic head cover, Erdogan says respect for basic human rights is his sole motivation in pushing through the amendment.

Many experts say lifting the ban upheld by the country's highest courts -- and, in a 2005 ruling, by the European Court of Human Rights -- will deal a blow to the state-religion separation, one of the founding principles of the modern Turkish Republic.