[A-List] RE: Turkey & the EU

["Sabri Oncu" <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Salaam:

> However, my understanding - please correct me, if I 
> am wrong - is that Turkey has a secular government, 
> because the Turkish army wants it that way. The army, 
> in other words acts as the guardian of the secular 
> revolution of Kemal Attaturk.

I don't think this is the case. To an outsider it may appear that way but it
was the army that put us in this weird situation in the first place.
Nationalist, fascist and islamic ideologies were encouraged by the army to
counter the left from early seventies and this may have some connection with
the US strategy of containing "communism" through the use of Islam in that
era as well. Also, after the 1980 coup, the military changed the election
laws in such a way that majority in the national assembly does not require
majority in the elections anymore. AKP, the Islamist party, won only about
33% of the votes, which according to some is about 25% of all registered
voters when those who did not vote are included, but whatever the actual
support of AKP is, it is not as big as outsiders may deduce from the fact
that they have the majority in the parliament. Moreover, majority of the
Turkish citizenry is quite content with secularizm as I see it. There has
always been a small Islamic fundamentalist base in Turkey since way back
when but I don't think, even after the encouragement of the seventies and
eighties, they constitute more than 10% of the current population. That AKP
received 33% of the votes in the last election has other social, political
and economic reasons.