On the walls of Ioanna Kuçuradi’s three-year-old “Center for Research and Application of the Philosophy of Human Rights” at Hacettepe University, the art immediately catches one’s eye. Cleverly displayed, it lures one into a gallery devoted to solidarity with the world of international ethics, her fledgling think tank on the outskirts of Turkey’s efficient capital. Greeting you in one direction is the large framed poster of a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary (in 1998) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with select provisions highlighted (“Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community. ...”). Hanging nearby is a colorful poster that offers Pastor Niemoller’s famous “First they came for the Jews. ...” caveat.
Over Kuçuradi’s desk, crammed with scholarly books and reports, hangs a creation of the center’s own students: a poster, designed around the photo of a baby, with the phrase Her Hakki Alemdar (“All Rights Reserved”). And across from the 64-year-old doyenne of Turkish philosophy -- chairwoman of Hacettepe’s philosophy department for 32 years, president of the Philosophical Society of Turkey -- hangs the copy of a celebrated painting that seems just right for an activist from the Greek minority who has seen her share of Turkish prisoners: Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.”
One might expect human rights to expand in just about any direction from this epicenter until you ask Kuçuradi about her habitual smoking, and glibly suggest that if she added “the right to smoke” to her panoply of entitlements, tobacco money might pour in and solve all her financial problems.
“Smoking is not a right,” she answers in her minimalist, clipped English. “Smoking is a vice.”
Another line drawn. Or is it another line noticed, though first drawn by someone or something else -- a higher power, human history, or the pressures of Turkish culture? For some, drawing lines among human rights clashes with the cherished post-Holocaust belief that we discover human rights rather than decide them -- that they’re a robust, happy Platonic leftover in a world otherwise gone pragmatist, Wittgensteinian, diverse, and relativist.
Michael Ignatieff described the situation crisply a few years ago in an overview of the Universal Declaration and the concept it enshrines. “Fifty years after its proclamation,” he wrote, “the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has become the sacred text of what Elie Wiesel has called ‘a world-wide secular religion.’ U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has called the Declaration the ‘yardstick by which we measure human progress.’ ”
Yet outside U.N. gatherings, in a 21st-century world with hundreds of nation-states and an unprecedented jumble of traditions, both de facto and de jure human rights flourish or flop in different countries the way plants or people do in peculiar climates. Kuçuradi’s own June conference on “The Right to Life” suggested as much.
Welcoming her audience -- a mix of Turkish and foreign philosophers, lawyers, sociologists, N.G.O. executives, government officials, graduate students, and a few of the police and security officers she teaches -- Kuçuradi urged everyone not to think of human rights just as entitlements to be learned, but as a state of mind, an outlook, that seeks to prevent “violations,” and not only “compensate for violations.” She welcomed a “criteria debate” to establish which rights counted as human rights, yet added, “There should be no hierarchy among human rights -- all human rights should be protected at the same time.” Finally, she urged realism. “Don’t think I believe that with human-rights education, the world can be turned into a paradise,” she warned.
The criteria debate Kuçuradi got -- on euthanasia, torture, globalization, terrorism, nationalism, prisoner rights -- provided the hybrid weave of local detail and universal principle one expects in such a setting. Sema Piskinst, a member of the Turkish parliament, described the miserable conditions faced by Turkish prisoners, and urged that “the state should be an example to the people.” The new Turkish minister for human rights, Edip Gaydali, acknowledged that “if Turkey wants to catch up” to other countries, “it has to take into consideration human rights. ... Where there are no human rights, there cannot be democracy, and vice versa.” While asserting that no countries “are perfect,” Gaydali conceded, “We have deficiencies regarding human rights.”
To say the least. Even commercial guidebooks refer to Turkey’s “dismal human-rights record” over decades: the many opposition parties shuttered; the prominent politicians hanged by their successors; the coups of 1960, 1971, and 1980; the repressive constitutions and press harassment; the suppression of Kurdish ethnic identity and historical abuses of non-Turkish minorities. It is an image fanned by widely seen movies like Midnight Express (1978) and Yol (1982).
At the same time, the guidebooks also credit Turkey for its nearly 80-year engagement with Westernization, its precocious establishment of women’s rights, the struggle of so many of its brave intellectuals to form a konusan (talking) society, free of retribution from soldiers or politicians. That makes its internal frictions over rights of all kinds alternately vocal and stealthy. At the conference itself, Rona Aybay, a noted jurist, stirred listeners by talking about a notorious Turkish judge who had, only a few years ago, repeated and endorsed an old line about the need to beat one’s wife. And Semih Gemalmaz, an Istanbul University law professor, declared that “our country has some ongoing pathologies” and elaborated on two: extrajudicial killings and the state’s failure to maintain accurate data on executions.
The hardest human-rights issues, of course, are the ones suppressed by a society’s business-as-usual assumptions. Is the firing of thousands of career employees by hugely profitable American companies a human-rights issue? Some would say so, but try finding that opinion in an American newspaper. Should ordinary citizens be permitted to criticize their royalty? It took a blood bath to raise that question in Nepal. Should an elected president who violated human rights, with millions of his countrymen in tacit support, face the international judicial music alone? Ask Slobodan Milosevic in his new Hague flat.
Sure enough, on the very day the “Right to Life” conference ended, the Turkish Constitutional Court banned the Virtue Party -- the chief opposition party that controlled 102 of the Turkish parliament’s 550 seats -- for activities, in the words of Chief Justice Mustafa Mumin, “contrary to the principles of the secular republic.” That’s the legal death knell in this unique republic founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938), self-annointed “Father of the Turks.” A heroic yet autocratic ex-general, he forged Turkey out of the defeated Ottoman Empire, despite the attempt of World War I’s Allied powers to dismember it. Atatrk, typically clad in sharp business suits, his intense, Bogart-like gaze exuding savvy and toughness, looks down on his people from the walls of virtually every Turkish office and official venue. Silently, he orders them to keep the faith in rejection of faith -- in the Westernized secular rationalism he imposed through sweeping reforms in the 1920’s and 30’s, including the banning of Islam in official life.
The court’s decision -- which also banned five Virtue officials from politics for five years -- echoed past practice. Turkey bans politicians and shuts down parties with the regularity of Italian governments’ declaring themselves defunct. Yet this time, many top Turkish politicians, including Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit, expressed regret, asserting that the decision would harm the country’s effort to enter the European Union and threaten its urgent plan to solve it’s inflation-fueled economic crisis. (Current exchange rate: $1 = 1,270,000 Turkish lira.)
Is it a human right to express one’s religious beliefs through a political party? None of the secular Turkish human-rights experts would go that far. “Would you protect an American Taliban party until it seized power and started stoning your women?” asked one. Secular Turks share a border with Iran. They not only loathe what they see in that theocracy -- they fear it.
The Turkish papers also pondered the issue. Wasn’t Virtue a party toned down from its Islamic predecessors, mainly battling for lifestyle issues such as a woman’s right to wear a head scarf in official settings? A few thought so. But Ayla Jean Yackley, in the Turkish Daily News, observed that “its enemies said it was a radical movement bent on overthrowing the secular order. ...” The paper’s citation of a Virtue Party official’s threat to “raise the flag against the West” lent that view credibility.
For Kuçuradi, a longtime survivor of Turkey’s fractious political tumult, the convergence point of Turkish politics and the philosophy of human rights is deeply complex. A fierce rationalist, she believes human rights are held by individuals, not groups, and that human rights and “citizen” rights are too frequently “confused.” Asked whether she agrees that the Virtue Party was practicing taqiya, a concealment of its true aims in the interest of Islam, she’s noncommittal but replies, “Any attempt to organize public affairs based on religious norms is very problematic.” Moreover, she adds in one of her essays, “What if a religion has certain elements doing harm to the human rights of those who believe in it?”
To her, the right balance is to teach a firm grasp of the vocabulary of human rights, a shrewd knowledge of their contexts, and a sharp ability to make correct evaluations of real-world situations. The danger of a philosophical approach is plain: If one treats human rights as mere policies, one strips them of the force they project when presented as objective entities. Yet if one argues that they boast unimpeachable authority by virtue of a Creator -- God, Reason, or a U.N. whose Universal Declaration disguises multiple compromises among democracies and dictatorships -- one loses credibility with all who reject the particular Creator.
Kuçuradi’s solution is simply to forge ahead: To draw in the police officers, the security operatives, the future government officials. To try to shape an “outlook” among people who carry guns. Here in the successor to the Ottoman Empire, where sultans once killed all their male relatives to crush potential threats, it’s one more tale of progress in human rights.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy at Temple University.
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