Enver Aydemir's warning conscience

When it comes to the asymmetrical relations between the Turkish people and their army, no one can pass over the contribution of compulsory military service to these relations in Turkey. The military training every Turkish man has to go through leaves quite considerable effects on the personality structure and state of mind of Turkish society as a whole. Even if people do not directly adopt the militarist ideology through extremely harsh indoctrination, under the effect of the trauma they live through it becomes inevitable that they move away from a healthy view of the world. For some, what is experienced in military service may stand in for a discipline of the self, but it is generally lived as a process in which the personality is injured, with the pain to be worked off in other stages of life.

This is not the only asymmetrical side of the matter. Besides being, as its name says, a compulsory duty, the fact that the content of the duty cannot be questioned in any way inevitably puts the personality entirely out of action. You cannot object to situations that may be contrary to your personality or beliefs. In fact you cannot object to anything. The only thing expected of you is obedience. With the weapon placed in your hand, you are ordered to regard as enemies people with whom you might never have had a problem in your life and to fire bullets at them. You have neither the right nor the means to question whether the war you are sent to is just or unjust.

In the 1960s in the US, when Muhammad Ali refused military service in Vietnam, he put forward this reason: "I never had any Vietnamese enemy. In my whole life I never had any problem with any of them, but now I am asked to go and kill some of them. My faith (Islam) does not permit me to go to such a senseless war." For saying this, Ali's athlete's license was taken away, but after that this had a warning effect on the matter of the right to conscientious objection in the US, and considerable progress was made on the subject.

Yet in Turkey everyone still has to go to the army, and almost no one, military or civilian, has any right to question any war. As citizens, no one has the option of not going to wars whose beginning and end they cannot question, of not firing bullets once they have gone, of not being counted as a martyr once they have died.

Yet both the Human Rights Committee and the UN Commission on Human Rights have accepted conscientious objection to military service as a part of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, held sacred in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Within this framework, "the right to conscientiously object to military service as a legitimate exercise of everyone's right to freedom of religion, thought and conscience" is recognized.

As if the quite deterrent sanctions, such as the difficulties those who have not done military service meet in the business world and being unable to enter public service, were not enough, those who wish to exercise this right of conscience also face prison or coercion.

Enver Aydemir notified, by petition in 2007, that he wished to exercise this right of conscience because he thought military service contravened the Islamic faith. According to Aydemir, the current military ideology and practice has no friendly attitude toward Islamic beliefs. Moreover, since it holds no sensitivity regarding the possibility of killing people unjustly, his doing military service constitutes a serious discomfort in terms of his beliefs. He also shows that he is not at all unjustified in this, citing the treatment shown toward his headscarved wife and mother who came to visit him in Bilecik, where, because of this petition, he was forcibly seized, conscripted and forced into a uniform. He is being asked to serve by force in an army that does not show respect, even as visitors, to the headscarves of his own mother and wife, and to regard as "enemy" those pointed out as such by people who do not respect his own beliefs, to fire weapons at them and kill them.

Aydemir goes on to say: "However, my real issue that I must announce to the public is that I do not feel sympathy for any of the fundamental values on which the Turkish Republic is founded. I do not expect anyone to feel sympathy for my values of faith by force either. Nevertheless, taking into account the realities of the geography I live in, within the responsibilities that common life brings, I declare that I can perform public service in an environment that is in keeping with my beliefs and in which my individual rights (freedom of education, freedom of dress, freedom of thought, etc.) are recognized."

It has been established by the testimony of his lawyers that Enver Aydemir, who is currently held in a military prison because of his insistence on conscientious objection, is being subjected to inhuman treatment and torture there.

As against a militarism that, despite all its secular ideology, freely uses the Turkish people's notions such as martyrdom, veteran status, the Prophet's Hearth and Mehmetçik when war and military service are concerned, the conscientious objection Aydemir displays carries a meaning far beyond being only his own individual cause. Perhaps it will sound strange, but it has a beneficial effect that forces the state toward a more secular line and at the same time invites it toward a line that invests in the citizen's life, not death, that brings life, not death, to the fore.

But still, of course, may the injustice Aydemir is subjected to be ended as soon as possible.