| The Kavakci Affair: Headscarves, Religious Rights, and Terrorist Front Groups Patrick L. Moore with Tamar Tesler
Journal of Counterterrorism & Security International;
Vol. 6, No. 1
1999 Fall
Some news stories, like Mr. Spock's chess game, are played out on multiple levels. To stay on the surface or miss a level of facts means one misses the whole story. Simply skimming the surface makes the reporter and his readers the prey of the propaganda artists, the manipulators of facts and events for their own ends.
Imam Siraj Wahaj, a member of CAIR's Board of Advisors, was listed as a potential unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing case.
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A classic case of this occurred in Turkey after its recent elections. It is a case which should be studied in detail to learn where the media and public opinion in the West are vulnerable. It shows that their weak point is precisely at the surface, where facts and assumptions are not what they seem, where the poison of disinformation can be force fed to society through the "Fourth Estate," the media, the unofficial institution intended to inform and invigorate public opinion. Western news coverage, as epitomized by the New York Times and National Public Radio, dealt only on the surface, i.e. with discussions of "religious rights" in Turkey in comparison to contemporary notions of "human rights" in the United States and the implied backwardness of Turkish government policy in this regard. Beneath the surface lay an entire substrata dealing with contacts and cooperation between Turkish political celebrity Merve Kavakci, radical Islamic fundamentalist front groups in the United States and their ties to radical Muslim terrorist groups in the Middle East. Instead of foreign constitutional law questions, in a country assumed by many not to be up to Western standards of human rights jurisprudence, being the major story, the real story was the discovery of yet another linkage in the worldwide radical Islamic terrorist network. The New York Times and NPR studiously avoided the real story of Kavakci's terrorist ties. The Turkish elections were already shaping up to be tense even before the polls opened on April 18th. The leadership of the Virtue Party (FP, the acronym in Turkish) may have sensed that something might be wrong even before the votes were cast. Although militant Islamic parties and movements have been recently touted by their proponents as the wave of the future in the Middle East, their efforts to re-Islamicize Turkish society seemed to have stalled. The FP's loss of ground in the April elections was even more surprising than anticipated. It went from a 21% share all the way down to 15% of the vote. As it turned out, that was merely the opening act of the ensuing drama or, as some might think, comedy of errors. (The FP, which participated in the April elections, was the thinly-disguised political heir to the Islamic fundamentalist Welfare Party, or Refah Party. The RP was ordered dissolved by the Turkish government on January 16, 1998, as, according to Agence France Presse, "a threat to Turkey's secular constitution." Strict secularism, a form of separation of church and state with teeth, is one of the explicit building blocks of the Turkish Republic. It is written into its constitution and is a part of the national legislator's oath of office. Attempting to lessen or reverse the secular nature of the Republic is specifically illegal in Turkey.) After the elections, on May 2, 1999, two young women who had worn the hijab (or, head scarf, a scarf covering the head but for the face, the traditional religious headdress of women in many Muslim countries) during their campaigns, were among the deputies-elect who filed into the chamber of the National Grand Assembly in Istanbul. One, Nesrin Unal, was bare-headed. The other, Ms. Merve Kavakci, was wearing her hijab as she had during the campaign. All hell broke loose. According to The New York Times (May 3), Assembly Deputies cried "Out, out!" The shouting brought the session to a halt. When a recess was called, Ms. Kavakci left the chamber and has not been back. Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, reported to be one of the angriest in the Assembly, was quoted by The New York Times (May 3) as saying, "No one may interfere with the private lives of individuals, but this is not a private space. This is the supreme foundation of the state. It is not a place in which to challenge the state." Ecevit previously said (evidently speaking before the first meeting of Parliament) in clarification of the rule against wearing the hijab in Parliament, also as quoted by The New York Times (May 2), "She can cover her head as she wishes in her private life and in her private work in Parliament, but when she is in the parliamentary chamber or in committee rooms, we expect her to conform to established rules and traditions." The New York Times also noted that "The head scarf has become an inflammatory symbol in Turkey. Powerful leaders consider it a sign of religious militancy and antisecular beliefs. Some women, however, say that their scarves are simply an expression of fidelity to Islam and have no political implication." The New York Times also reported that, in Ms. Kavakci's case, she had said "her scarf simply reflected her private commitment to Islam . ." On the eve of the incident, however, it appeared that Kavakci's wearing of her head scarf may have been a planned political event. According to The New York Times, "Virtue Party leaders have said they are unable to overrule Ms. Kavakci's decision. 'She gave the election authorities a picture of herself in a head scarf and they did not object,' said one of them, Abdullah Gul. 'It is up to her.'" Further, The Times quoted Kavakci herself as saying that "Banning head scarves is a form of pressure. It shames all political parties. If the deputies maintain their opposition to head scarves, in the next election they will be buried at the polls. I'm not going to take off my head scarf . ." In a story on Kavakci's having worn her hijab during the campaign, the Dallas Morning News quoted Kavakci as saying prior to the election that "We will see how democratic people are" and that, according to Kavakci, a test of Turkish democracy would be if she were allowed to take her seat in the Assembly. As late as May 16th, she was still maintaining in the Turkish press that "My head is covered because of my faith." Nesrin Unal, of the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party, the other woman who wore the hijab during the campaign, said before the election that she would not wear her hijab in Parliament. Ms. Unal is quoted The New York Times as saying, "My goal is to serve the people . . I don't want a confrontation over the head scarf issue. That would create tensions that would harm Turkey." The issues for the media to examine were, obviously, what were Ms. Kavakci's motivations, what difference did it make if women serving in the Turkish Assembly could wear the hijab, who stood to gain by creating a scandal, who was making use of the press generated by the incident, and what difference did it all make? Of all these questions, the Western media, except for one reporter, read the story at the surface and missed the real issue which dealt with the ties between the Refah Party, domestic Islamist party (i.e. the FP) and possibly the radical Islamic terrorist groups and fronts and how that could affect the political stability of Turkey, its status as an ally of the United States and member of NATO, and the survivability of perhaps the most secular government of all the Muslim countries of the Middle East. The common factor which bought them all together and which was just beneath the surface was the terrorism of radical Islam, and the friends of terrorism, not necessarily or only in Turkey, but here in the United States. American journalist and expert on Middle Eastern terrorism, Steven Emerson, was the first to break through the conventional "surface" coverage of the Kavakci Affair. He provided the Turkish press with facts and documentation of her connection to a radical Muslim terrorist front group operating here in the United States, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). Emerson had obtained an audio tape of a speech Kavakci had made at the 1997 IAP meeting in Chicago, Illinois. |
The IAP is the principal American front group for Hamas (the Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement). IAP has set up an elaborate publications and video operation, in both Arabic and English, promoting Hamas and radical Islamic views. In the past, it has distributed terrorist recruitment videos through a company called Aqsa Vision and has published Hamas communiqus calling for armed attacks. Its annual conferences have been used as vehicles to bring leading Islamic militants into the United States. At one conference in Kansas City, a featured speaker was the head of the military wing of Hamas. At another conference, young terrorist recruits were taught bomb making. At its Chicago conferences held in December 1996 and 1997, militants representing Middle East and U.S.-based groups issued violent and racist exhortations. Records from World Trade Center bombing trials show calls made to the IAP by conspirators who were later convicted. [Merve Kavakci's father, Dr. Yusuf Zai Kavakci, is the Imam or spiritual leader of the Dallas Central Mosque of the Islamic Association of North Texas. It is considered to be one of the most active centers of Hamas activity in the United States and hosts the leadership and members of both the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and the Holy Land Foundation (HLF). Both organizations are the primary conduits for Hamas activity and fundraising in the United States.] In her 1997 IAP speech, Kavakci held forth on how she was engaged in a Jihad (i.e. Holy War) in Turkey but that her form of Jihad was in the political arena. "[Not] everybody has to be in politics to be making Jihad. But this is the area where I, myself, have chosen to make my Jihad. . What's important here is the responsibility to Allah that we will be asked . did we make Jihad." Again she called for the unification of Muslims under an Islamic flag: "Therefore, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Muslims all around the world have to somehow gather under the flag of Islamic union which will enable us to act and react as one central body . . Muslims of Turkey, . have already started their part in this work . ." At the 1997 IAP meeting, Kavakci spoke along with Ishaq Farhan. Farhan said that "As we step into the 21st century, we have to impose sharia [Islamic law] as the state law." He also said that "Sudan is the model for independence from the West." (He expressed no reservations as to Sudan's own Jihad and resumption of slavery targeting the Christians in the south of that country.) Farhan is a well-known radical Muslim. Newsday, October 23, 1995, reported that "Farhan is determined to make sure Jordan continues to teach its children that war against the Jews is a religious obligation." The same article went on: "'The Jews are taught they are the chosen people and all others are beasts and animals put on earth to serve them,' he said. 'So frankly speaking, this region can't hold two civilizations. Either we prevail with the Islamic civilization or the Jews prevail. There is no hope for these to be together.'" By May 4th, just two days after Kavakci's hijab demonstration in Parliament, a Turkish newspaper, the Istanbul Milliyet was publishing stories quoting Turkish President Suleyman Demirel as accusing her of having links to Hamas and the America-based IAP. One Deputy Chairman of Kavakci's Virtue Party, Abdullah Gul, was reported as referring to the Milliyet report as "merciless character assasination . launched through the Turkish media," but not saying that he actually denied the speech she made, nor her being hosted at the IAP function, or the facts of the nature of the IAP. (On the other hand, as also reported in Milliyet, another Deputy Chairman of the Virtue Party, Aydin Menderes, resigned from the party on May 6th following the incident. He was reported as criticizing Kavakci for unnecessarily thrusting the Virtue Party and the Turkish Republic into a crisis by deciding to wear the hijab in the Assembly chamber.) Neither The New York Times nor NPR gave even nodding attention to the revelations of Kavakci's ties to terrorist front groups and her contacts through them with terrorist spokesmen and hate mongers. As of the date of this writing (June 4, 1999), they have maintained a stolid silence on Kavakci's radical Islamic connections. A new disclosure then surfaced in the Turkish press that Kavakci had given a speech in 1996 to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). ISNA, headquartered in Plainfield, Indiana, is a front for various groups including the Muslim Brotherhood (the oldest militant fundamentalist organization) and Hamas. ISNA, which holds annual meetings, had over 20,000 in attendance at its December 1997 annual convention. (Merve Kavakci has a direct connection to ISNA through her father, Dr. Yusuf Zai Kavakci, who was elected in 1997 to the "shura" or council of ISNA.) According to a transcript of that speech, she stated her opposition to the secular nature of the Turkish Republic and announced the intention of (as it was then called) the Refah Party (RP) to replace the Republic with an expressly Islamic state run according to Islamic religious law. In her speech she said, "Now I can probably announce that with the new Refah government in Turkey, it's time for Muslims of Turkey to unite, and it's time for the Muslims of the world to unite as one body, under the name of Islamic Union . in the very near future."Kavacki's speaches, her attendance at radical fundamentalist functions in 1996 and 1997, and her sharing a podium without complaint or protest with militant advocates of imposing Islamic religious government under Mulsim Shari'a law indicated a hidden agenda to substitute an Islamic theocracy for the secular Republic of Turkey. The problem for Kavakci is that it is illegal under Turkish law to call for the replacement of the secular republic by an Islamist state. Kavakci went on during her 1996 ISNA speech to say that during her work for this Islamist goal, the men and women of Refah were following the Refah Party program: "We had our headquarters as the men had one headquarters and we worked parallel with them, of course, we were always under the command of our Prime Minister Najmuddin Erbakan." The Refah program, of course, was to bring Turkey under Islam, as she further stated: "We can divide people of the world, the whole of humanity into two groups. Either they are from Hizbu [party of] Refah, they are in the way of Islam, they have accepted Islam or they are candidates to accept Islam." She spoke in glowing terms of her visit to the Sudan where, in discussions with her "colleagues" there they decided "we should be united so we can act together against violence going on against Muslims all around the world." She did not raise any objection to the institution of Islamic shariah law as the basic law of Sudan, to the systematic violence being conducted by the radical Islamic regime in its Jihad or Holy War against the Christians in the south of Sudan, nor to the resumption there of the black African slave trade. These statements, which were obviously made in the context of her career in Turkey and Turkish politics, and the very fact of her association with the likes of ISNA, once discovered, raised a firestorm in Turkey, a country which has worked long and hard to avoid religious civil war and hatred, primarily through maintaining a barrier between church and state (even stricter than our own) as written into its charter documents in accordance with the vision of the Republic's founder, Kemal Ataturk. |
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