Black Women In Ministry

Turkey's bitter election: On the last lap

IT IS now official: women should have babies and stay at home. That was how feminists greeted this week’s announcement by Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that he would scrap the ministry for women, along with seven other cabinet jobs. Coming days before the June 12th election, it has raised fears that a third term for Mr Erdogan’s mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party could embrace a new puritanism.

Mr Erdogan suggests instead a ministry for “family and social policies…as we are a conservative democratic party, we need to strengthen the family structure.” His words set off alarm bells among those who recall the AK government’s previous efforts to criminalise adultery and Mr Erdogan’s calls for women to have at least three children. He is fiercely against day-care centres. Those who entrust their children to others, he said, would end up alone in old-age homes. “Do the maths,” snaps Hulya Gulbahar, a feminist lawyer. “He wants us to have three children and stay at home. In other words, no career for at least 15 years.”

Claims by the secular establishment that the AK party’s ultimate plan is to introduce sharia law are plainly overblown. Yet such thinking lay behind the unsuccessful attempt by prosecutors to ban the AK party in 2008. Among its supposed crimes was seeking to ease restrictions on the Islamic-style headscarf in universities, which have kept thousands of pious women from pursuing their education. In fact, since it came to power in 2002, the AK government has pushed through unparalleled reforms, giving women more rights than ever. Rape inside marriage is now a criminal offence. Penalties for “honour killings” of women who mix with men to whom they are not married have been stiffened. But Ms Gulbahar, who helped craft some of these measures, complains that Mr Erdogan “turned” after being re-elected for a second term of single-party rule in 2007.