Mick Hartley

The modernising secularist legacy of Ataturk looks increasingly frail:

A drastic rise in reported "honor" killings and fatal domestic violence in Turkey has sparked a vigorous debate about the government's recent attempts to address the problem. It also highlights the clash of conservative values with the country's rapid modernization.

Government figures released in February suggest murders of women increased 14-fold in seven years, from 66 in 2002, to 953 in the first seven months of 2009. In the past seven months, one rights organization has compiled more than 264 cases – nearly one per day – reported in the press in which a woman was killed by a family member, husband, ex-husband, or partner.

“There’s been an incredible increase," says Gulhan Yag, a young activist who recently attended a funeral for a teenage girl killed for eloping with her boyfriend. "This feels like a genocide against women.”  […]

Turkey’s statistics on gender equality remain abysmal by almost any standard. While in recent years the country has made tremendous strides economically, improved the situation of its ethnic and religious minorities, and is increasingly enjoying greater political clout on the global stage, it has languished near the bottom of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap reports since the index was created in 2005. It is currently ranked 126 out of 134 countries – lower even than Iran.

On the question of the rising violence, some suggest the rapid urbanization of the past two decades, twinned with the growth of civil society movements, have given rise to a gender war.

“A lot of the honor killings in Istanbul are being committed by people who moved from villages in the southeast,” says Vildan Yirmibesoglu, head of Istanbul’s Human Rights Council. “Women who didn’t previously go out on the streets are part of community life in a way they didn’t used to be. They want to study to go to school and to express themselves, and families don’t approve of this.

The record of the ruling Islamist AKP under Recip Tayip Erdogan suggests that they may not be entirely committed to combating such "conservative values" and leading Turkey through these difficult times towards a bright Western-style liberal democracy. See Caroline Glick: