Hundreds of thousands of young people who seek to get a good score from the university entrance exam in order to enroll in a popular department at a good university have to abandon their hobbies and the activities they like at their most dynamic age, and work day and night to pass the entrance exam -- a real watershed in their lives -- instead of spending time with their friends or loved ones. Making significant sacrifices in their lives, these young people can come out of this stressful process only if they can get a good score that will help them qualify for a good department. Unfortunately, most of them fail to do so. Indeed, there are some exceptions that cannot get rid of the exam’s depression even if they are successful at it. If you are a girl and wear the headscarf because of your religious beliefs, you are to be subjected to another ordeal, which is perhaps more stressful and painful than the university entrance exam, as it pits you against your own self, values and beliefs. You are expected to abandon either the values stemming from your beliefs and on which you build your identity, or your right to the university education which you have been dreaming of and for which you have qualified after a long and arduous struggle.
For some 25 years, Turkey has been giving this “Sophie’s Choice”-like dilemma to women who wear the headscarf. A group of people who are nested in the state apparatus and at universities -- which are supposed to be a haven for freedom and a diversity of views -- has imposed rules of proper apparel on people who are old enough to decide what to eat or drink or wear on their own. These institutions -- which we call “universities” out of habit despite their inhuman prohibitionist and imposing attitudes – insistently keep in place the quite arbitrary practice of banning women wearing the headscarf from attending a higher education program, never seen anywhere else around the world. However, neither the Constitution nor the penal code nor the regulations relating to higher education contain provisions justifying such a ban. Some despotic university managements -- which fail to understand what being a university means in a universal sense but still insist on implementing this shameful ban -- and their supporters and sycophants in politics, bureaucracy, civil society and media refer, as their pretext for their primitive prohibitionist practices, to several phrases used by the Constitutional Court in the explanatory section of a decision. By forcing young girls to make a vital decision that would create chaos and confusion in their inner worlds at the most important turning point in their lives and subjecting them to a test their peers do not take, these officials are participating in a cruelty that is hard to describe.
The more tragic bit is that these despotic university managements pave the way for this cruelty being transformed into a tool for their political supporters. The universities which create this problem, by depriving tens of thousands of young women from their dreams of a higher education or by exerting enormous pressure on them, are actually politicizing to the highest extent a matter of personal choice, i.e., the headscarf, which shouldn’t be a problem at all.
Then, they send this problem to the Republican People’s Party (CHP) for its abuse. As the political representative of the groups who have had primary responsibility for the continuation of this cruelty for 25 years, the CHP unethically rushes to manipulate this problem within a political context. CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s recent rhetoric of “We will solve the headscarf issue” in return for “no” at the referendum must be evaluated in this context.
This is like what the illegal networks that run car parks on roadsides in big cities such as İstanbul and Ankara do. This must have happened to anyone who has a car. As you try to park your car somewhere where it is perfectly legal to park, some ominous looking guys approach and say: “Man, if you give us five bucks, we will take care of your car. Otherwise, someone may puncture your tires or scratch your polish. Be warned, anyways.” You will clearly understand that it is an implicit threat, and you will grudgingly make the payment out of fear that something bad might happen to your car.
Just like what these networks do, the CHP, which is the initiator of the headscarf problem and a main blocker of all efforts to solve it, and Kılıçdaroğlu, its leader who was elected to office via some unusual methods, claims that they will solve the headscarf issue, as if to mock the nation’s ability to reason. I think someone should tell these “illegal car park networks of politics” that this issue would not have arisen in the first place if it were not for your antidemocratic and despotic attitudes. But we need to read correctly what Kılıçdaroğlu says. Just like the parking gangs who give conditional and reverse assurance, Kılıçdaroğlu actually says, “If you do not say ‘no’ in the referendum and if you do not support the CHP in the upcoming general elections, you will not see any solution to the headscarf issue.” So he is using this problem they have created as a perfect tool for blackmail.
The CHP which took the constitutional reforms that removed the ban on headscarves on university campuses with the support of 80 percent of Parliament to the CHP-controlled Constitutional Court in 2008, forcing annulment with support from the pro-CHP media that ran the headline, “411 rose to chaos,” is no different from the CHP that claims it has the ability to solve the headscarf problem. It is the CHP of Professor Nur Serter and Professor Necla Arat, who established in their respective universities the “persuasion rooms” to persuade headscarved girls to remove their headscarves, reminiscent of the Nazi era.
By saying that they are capable of solving the headscarf issue, the CHP appears quite like not only the parking gangs but also the criminal organizations which try to exact money from rich businessmen whose children they take hostage. Still these blackmails and threats from these political gangs continue to strip young girls of their university dreams and create profound trauma in their lives. It is time someone tells Kılıçdaroğlu, “Get out of my sunlight.”
