Турки думают о событиях в Париже (по-английски)
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France, Muslims, Turkey and the EU
Tuesday, November 8, 2005


Opinion by Cengiz AKTAR

Cengiz AKTAR

A small-scale uprising has now been going on for over a week in France. The actors that employ urban guerilla tactics come from the pockets of Muslim Arabs living in the outskirts of major French towns. What we are witnessing is essentially a "jacquerie," the uprising of the poor against their rich masters in Medieval Europe.

Republican communitarianism

The population of France is 62 m, 45 m of which consists of baptized Catholics. While the official statistics state the number of the Muslim population as 3.7 m, the real figure is estimated to be closer to 8 m. It is difficult to get precise figures as census results do not indicate the religious affiliations of the French (the number of Catholics can be gleaned from Church baptism records.) The overwhelming majority of the Muslim population comes from former French colonies in North Africa, namely Algeria (35%), Morocco (25%) and Tunisia (10%). The number of Turkish immigrants is about 400,000. Islam is the unchallenged runner up as the second most widely practiced religion. North Africans are the population segment hardest hit by the sharp fluctuations in the French economy and stigmatized by French society. The overall social and economic position of French Muslims indicate that the social cohesion policies of the French state for the last five decades have failed to bear fruit. The universalistic French model is supposed to reduce and dissolve inequalities in a republican and secular scheme, but it tends to fall short in some instances. The Muslims were never allowed to genuinely participate in the process of social integration and leveling. French society or the “republican community” in France was reluctant to embrace the North African Arabs. Just as it is currently reluctant to embrace Turkey as a EU member.



France, the Arab world and the EU

There is an implicit and profound link between the events in France and Turkey's prospects of EU membership. The EU's decision on October 3 to open the negotiations with Turkey was perceived as a message of solidarity by Muslims living in European states, countries with heavily Muslim populations like Albania and Bosnia and for the Arab and Muslim world in general. Every vital decision in the domain of Turkish-EU relations was covered by their press. Political leaders from the President of Algeria to the King of Morocco to the Heads of State of Syria and Tunisia took every occasion to underscore that Turkey's relations with the EU were a testing ground for them. The prospects of the EU membership of Turkey, which they regard as a fraternal state, may one day extend to a collaboration that will spur social change, democracy and welfare in their own countries. This is certainly a more attractive prospect than the hard-line policies of change pursued by the USA in Iraq. However there is one crucial point to bear in mind: Neither the message sent by the EU to Turkey nor the way it was perceived by Muslims have been of a religious nature. The integration into the EU of Turkey, with whom these countries share a number characteristics, has political, economic and social, rather than religious, implications for them. The attention of the Muslim public is focused not on "the model of a Muslim democracy pared of extremism" but on the prospect of a different country like theirs acceding to the EU considered as a land of peace and prosperity. The claims made by the likes of Huntington that Turkey is set to be the leader of the Muslim world do not resonate in these countries. This dyed in the wool doomsayer and solution partner of Bin Laden recently raged again about Turkey's EU membership. He suggested that our membership would have no implications for the Arab world because Turkey is marginal to the Arab and Muslim world. Well, negotiations have now formally started despite the contrary allegations of this peevish old man who self-servingly insists that civilizations have to clash and threw a tantrum on the eve of October 3, stating "they will not admit you to the EU." With the start of negotiations a new perspective has now been granted that will hinder the kind of events we see in France from developing in the future. Two last points are in order: When lured by the easy fixes of nationalistic, hard-line policies, politicians in open societies should remember the predicament in which France's ill-tempered and racist minister of interior Nicolas Sarkozy today finds himself. Second, the French rebels should be familiar to us from the scenes of the youth of Istanbul coming from the peripheral neighborhoods to gather in Kadıköy on May 1, 1996.NOTE: This article is being published direct from the writer and has not been edited by Turkish Daily News staff. Any and all mistakes of those of the writer alone.

© 2005 Dogan Daily News Inc. www.turkishdailynews.com.tr


и ещё одна, из "Нью Анатолиана"


Violent incidents in France have nothing to do with our Islam
Ilnur Çevik


Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday said the ban on headscarves has triggered the ongoing violent incidents in France .

The prime minister is dead wrong and has to realize that by making such statements he's playing into the hands of the French ultra-right political elements, who claim the riots that started in Paris ' suburbs and are currently sweeping France are the work of Islamists.

We were in Northern Cyprus for the holidays and had the opportunity to read practically all the British dailies with great ease, and managed to watch Western TV news channels. Both the stories and the analyses that emerged from Paris conclude that the incidents, which started in a suburb with the deaths of two African teenagers and then spread to nine suburbs and then the rest of France , have nothing to do with Islam and are the work of outcasts who feel excluded from the rich white society.

The members of the gangs involved in these riots apparently come from families who live in the suburbs and are seriously ignored by the French government.

A leading non-governmental organization (NGO) in France wrote in the daily Independent that there are two causes for the riots that have spread like wildfire:

The first is the attitude of Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who threatened to “hose down” the “scum” in the suburbs. That lit the fuse on an explosive situation that had been heating up for some time.

The second is the deep sense of grievance among the people of the suburbs who have been ignored for so long.

An analysis in The Independent said: "Despite the inflammatory rubbish written by some right-wing commentators in the French press about a ' Paris intifada' this isn't an Islamic insurrection or a political revolution of any kind."

So it's clear that some European and especially French right-wing militants will try to use the incidents to spread more anti-Islamic feeling, and even create a new atmosphere to block Turkish membership in the European Union. At least our prime minister shouldn't have fallen into this trap.

She has spies in orphanages…

State Minister Nimet Cubukcu, who's in charge of women and family affairs, has come under intense fire from the opposition and even from the media for not doing enough to prevent a scandal at the Malatya orphanage where children were mistreated.

At the time we commented that such incidents have been widespread in our orphanages for decades, and it's wrong simply to pick on one minister. We also called on the government to take up the issue and take solid steps to prevent orphan children from being abused.

But now we see that the minister herself has talked and is really putting her foot in her mouth. She claims she's closely monitoring the orphanages and that she has a few “child spies” in each orphanage telling her what's going on. Recruiting child spies may be a good idea, but did the minister have to reveal this? Isn't she aware that when the crooked administrators of orphanages hear these revelations they'll be more harsh on the children and try to “weed out” the spies, and in the process create more trouble for the children? Can she protect these children?

Besides all this, where were her spies when the children in Malatya were being abused?