A backlash of conservative parliamentarians and protests against a key piece of pro-women's rights legislation may indicate the beginning of political efforts to once again curtail women’s rights.
It takes a lot to rattle Shukria Barakzai, a staunch defender of women's rights and one of more than 20 very outspoken women members of parliament in Afghanistan.But even though she’s run two successful parliamentary campaigns and has taken on conservative members of Afghan society, she is shocked by how easily some male members of parliament are now publicly threatening their female counterparts in the middle of parliamentary meetings.
“A [male] member of parliament stood up in our general meeting yesterday and said parliament is not a place for women, your time is up here, you must not pursue this fight for women’s rights,” says Ms. Barakzai.
For many of the Afghan women leaders, dealing with sexism and discrimination isn’t anything new. But women's rights activists say that male parliamentarians have recently intensified a war of words inside parliament. It’s a war that many Afghan women worry echoes a greater issue in society and could reverse public tolerance and support for women’s rights.
“I’ve noticed the rhetoric around women’s issues has changed, and conservative members of society and parliament are once again feeling safe to verbally attack women publicly,” says Barakzai. “The Afghan government isn’t doing anything about these kinds of public threats and attacks on women. It is almost as if they agree with the conservatives.”The actions of the male parliamentarians are just one of many reminders to Barakzai and other women here that as the international security forces, foreign diplomats, and advocacy organizations prepare to leave the country in 2014, Afghan women will be left without a key source of support.
“I feel like Afghan women are right at the gate of realizing their civil and political rights but the international community is too busy packing up to notice that these rights are already starting to erode,” says Horia Mosadiq, a Human Rights Researcher for Amnesty International.
Rise in violence against women
High levels of domestic violence against women and the targeting of women leaders by the Taliban and other armed groups only compound matters.
The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission documented more than 4,000 cases of violence against women from March 21 to Oct. 21, 2012 – a rise of 28 percent compared with the same period for 2011. Though some of the increase in violence is attributed to growing public awareness and better reporting of violence against women, it is still concerning, say activists.
Several women leaders were also killed in 2012, including two directors of the Department of Women’s Affairs, a branch of the Afghan government, in the eastern province of Laghman. Both women were strong advocates for the equal treatment of women.
“Afghan women have faced these challenges all along, but the difference now is that the timeline for the international community to completely disengage is nearing, after which these conservatives will feel even more forceful in imposing their restricted views and values over people and reversing many of the legal and professional gains Afghan women have made in recent years,” says Orzala Ashraf Nemat, an Afghan women's rights activist and founder of the nonprofit organization Humanitarian Assistance for the Women and Children of Afghanistan (HAWCA).
‘The mood is changing’
In mid-May, conservative members of the Afghan parliament lashed out against a 2009 presidential decree that was signed into law by President Hamid Karzai on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. They claimed that the EVAW law does not represent the fundamental tenets of Islamic law and is being imposed on Afghan women by Western countries.
The law is widely considered to be one of the country’s biggest accomplishments for women in the past decade: It criminalizes 22 acts of violence against women, including marital rape and child marriage. But recently some conservative groups, including male members of parliament, have publicly said that if Afghan women push for too much freedom, it will divide society and intensify the conflict.
“The mood is changing and we see in parliament and elsewhere that conservative forces are publicly pushing back on women’s rights because they think Afghan women don’t have support from foreign countries and advocacy organizations anymore,” Ms. Nemat says.
Barakzai and other Afghan women’s rights activists say that the United States, Britain, and Afghanistan’s other key allies need to continue to push the Afghan government to support laws such as the EVAW law, and action plans that not only increase women’s rights but protect the hard-earned gains Afghan women have made since 2001.
One of these plans is the 10-year National Action Plan for the Women of Afghanistan, which was launched by the Afghan government in 2008 and calls for changes in six sectors that are critical in accelerating the improvement of the status of women in the country.
However, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, which is charged with most of the responsibility for implementing this plan, is allocated only 0.1 percent of Afghanistan’s $6.8 billion national budget.
“What the Afghan government allocates for the ministry of women’s affairs and women’s issues across all of the Afghan ministries is not enough. We still need countries who are contributing to Afghanistan’s national budget to allocate at least 25 percent of their contribution strictly for women’s issues,” says Barakzai.
Two years ago when the talks about a 2014 withdrawal from Afghanistan were picking up in Kabul, some Afghan women leaders and activists believed that the protection of women’s rights would be a top priority and a nonnegotiable part of the transition.
But some leaders of women’s nonprofits in Afghanistan report that since late 2011, funding for critical programs supporting women’s shelters, advocacy campaigns, and education initiatives for women and girls have dried up.
Marzia Shukoor, a sophomore at Kabul University, says when she started her studies two years ago she had hopes of opening her own architectural consulting business when she graduated.
“Now I don’t know. I have to wait and see what happens with the security and if there will be any restrictions placed on women who work,” says the 20-year-old.
There is something almost comic in the way the missteps of the Turkish government turned a small demonstration aimed at preserving sycamore trees in Taksim Square from the developers' bulldozers into the biggest and most widespread popular protest ever seen in Turkey. The Turkish security forces made the classic mistake of being pictured on television and social media publicly assaulting peaceable protesters with water cannon and pepper spray. Just enough violence was used to enrage and provoke while wholly failing to intimidate.
There was a time when brutality by the security forces was easier to keep off TV screens by censorship or frightening journalists and media-owners. But these mechanisms no longer work when people have a multitude of TV channels inside and outside the country to choose from. Running documentaries on penguins, as CNN Turkey notoriously did, simply creates a vacuum of information which is rapidly filled by protesters. The government's version of what is happening becomes self-marginalised and is ignored.
It is astonishing that skilled politicians such as the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and those around him should make so many mistakes in such a short time. It is easy to why Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt should have miscalculated popular reaction to repression at the start of the Arab uprisings in 2011, because as rulers of police states their approach to public opinion was to ignore it.
But how did Erdogan fall into the same trap? An obvious explanation is simply the arrogance of those who have held power for too long. They ignore advice and demonise and underrate their critics. There is nothing very Turkish in this. The same was true of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair who, like Erdogan, had each won three election victories and were facing an electorate that blamed them for anything that went wrong.
The parallel should be between Turkey and Western Europe, not between Turkey and Middle East states. One of the many reasons why foreigners find Turkey so difficult to understand is that they imagine that its politics have similarities with other Muslim states in the region, which are not there. It is true that Turkey has had four military coups since 1960, which vie with anything that happened in Iraq or Argentina for the cruelty of the repression. In the 1980 military coup 450 people died under torture, 50 were executed and many others disappeared. At least 178,000 people were arrested and almost all tortured, while 64,000 were jailed.
This makes Turkish politics sound like Iraq under the Ba'ath Party or Argentina under the junta. But Turkey never ceased to have elections that, unlike in Latin American and Middle Eastern police states, mattered in the distribution of power. Even at the height of military rule, Turkey never wholly ceased to be a democratic state in which powerful parties stood for election and the outcome was not fixed from above as in Mubarak's Egypt or Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Foreign commentary on the Taksim Square protests over the last week speaks of the competition between "secularism" and "Islam" in Turkey. But in almost all cases it is evident that the writers have not taken on board what these words mean in a Turkish context. "Secularism" in Turkey brings with it the same intensity of belief as a religious cult, attracting at one time the officer class, the professionals, the civil service, the security service and many of the well educated.
But at the heart of Kemal Ataturk's legacy is not secularism, which appealed primarily to the elite, but a super-heated nationalism that had an appeal to all Turkish social classes, though not to all ethnic communities. Hence the great difficulty Erdogan may have in bringing to an end to the 30-year guerrilla war with the Kurds of south-east Turkey despite the ceasefire agreement that was reached in March.
The Taksim Square protests and Turkey's draining entanglement in the Syrian civil war have brought to an end for the moment talk of a resurgent Turkey emulating the old Ottoman empire in terms of influence in the Middle East and even in the Balkans and around the Black Sea. This always seemed to me to exaggerate the political, military and economic strength of Erdogan's Turkey. The idea of "the new Ottomans" carried hidden dangers that Ankara was slow to understand.
First, what was the region where Turkey was going to exercise its enhanced influence? It was primarily among countries such as Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran, notoriously the most dangerous places in the world for interfering foreign states. The US, at the height of its power, suffered two of its biggest defeats here: the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and its calamitous occupation of Iraq in 2003-11. But now Turkey was confidently lurching into the same quagmire in the expectation of swift enhancement of its influence.
There is not much talk of "the new Ottomans" these days. Erdogan's gamble that Bashar al-Assad and his government would swiftly collapse has not paid off. Instead Turkey has a raging war beginning to spill across its 500-mile southern frontier with Syria. Syrian leaders have been enjoying themselves by applying Erdogan's criticisms of the Syrian regime to Turkey and demanding that he resign. Turkey has ended up acting as proxy for the US in Syria, something that is highly unpopular in Turkey.
Erdogan may feel good about his easy access to the White House, but he has made some serious enemies in Tehran and Damascus. There is no reason to suppose that they have anything to do with the current protests, but Turkey will have difficulty reaching an accommodation with its own Kurds and the Kurds in Iraq in the face of Iranian opposition.
Turkey is peculiarly ill equipped to get entangled in sectarian and ethnic conflicts now exploding in Syria and Iraq. It has been unable to resolve its own Kurdish issue at home and is unlikely to be able to deal with inter-ethnic and sectarian conflicts abroad. It may not have started out intending to be part of a Sunni Muslim offensive against the Shia or allied to the Sunni monarchs of the Gulf, but it has ended up that way. Its wooing of the Iraqi Kurds and their oil and gas will be forcefully opposed by the Shia in Baghdad and Tehran.
Erdogan's mistakes in dealing with the Taksim Square protests and the failures of Turkish foreign policy are not irretrievable ones. But the weaknesses of the Turkish state and the depth of the political divisions within Turkey are becoming more apparent. The demonstrations are also highlighting failings that had previously been masked by Turkey's economic success at a time when much of Europe is mired in recession. Such impressions are important because the flow of foreign capital into Turkey depends on a sense that the country is stable compared to its neighbours.
Nightly riots in western Turkey, bombs exploding in the south of the country and the possibility of renewed Kurdish unrest in the east is sapping the belief inside and outside Turkey that the country is still one of the world's success stories.
