US embassy cable - 05ANKARA4914

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 ANKARA 004914 
 
SIPDIS 
 
E.O. 12958: DECL: 08/23/2015 
TAGS: PGOV, PREL, PINS, TU 
SUBJECT: THE REAL STRENGTH OF THE AK PARTY:  ITS WOMEN 
 
 
Classified By: Political Counselor John Kundstadter for reasons 1.4 (b, 
 d). 
 
1.  (C) SUMMARY:  AK Party's women provide the energy that 
fuels AKP's mighty grassroots machine.  The women feel valued 
by the Party's leaders and they are particularly enamored 
with PM Erdogan.  That they are being used by the men in the 
party is almost irrelevant--the woman derive substantial 
social, psychological and, in some cases, economic benefits 
from their activity in the AK Party Women's Auxiliary.  END 
SUMMARY. 
 
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The Auxiliary 
------------------ 
 
2.  (C)  We have met with six different AK Party Women's 
Auxiliary groups:  the National Headquarters, the Ankara and 
Sivas Provincial Headquarters, and three Ankara 
Sub-provincial Headquarters (Cubuk, Mamak, and Altindag).  In 
every meeting male PolOff attended, male AK Party members 
were in the room or within earshot.  In Sivas, despite men 
being present, Auxiliary President Suheyla Akkas was clearly 
in control and in charge of the meeting.  In Cubuk, however, 
the male AK Party members dominated the meetings in spite of 
PolOffs' best efforts to engage the women.  In all the other 
meetings with female PolOff, no men were present. 
 
3.  (C)  The overall majority of women attending the meetings 
wore turban headscarves, but only one of the six chairwomen 
wore a turban.  (Comment:  the "turban" is a scarf tightly 
wrapped around the head and neck, made popular by political 
Islam-influenced women such as the PM's wife, Emine Erdogan. 
The turban is different than the traditional headscarf worn 
by many traditional and pious women.  The turban is an 
indication that the wearer supports political Islam. End 
Comment.)  In a Mamak meeting with male PolOff present, all 
but three of twelve women wore a turban.  Later when only a 
female PolOff met with the group, five of seven were without 
a turban.  (Comment:  We suspect that AK Party's male 
leadership "prefers/encourages" the women's groups to "elect" 
uncovered chairwomen in order to create the image to 
outsiders that AK Party is a secular, non-Islamist party. 
End Comment.) 
 
4.  (C) The AK Party's Women's Auxiliary, according to 
National Director Selma Kavaf, is interested in educating and 
promoting women in politics.  Kavaf also says the group does 
not want to be merely a fixture, but actually "contribute" to 
the party.  She claims forty-six percent of the group's 
membership has some sort of post-high school degree or 
certificate and brazenly asserts that thirty-three percent of 
all Turkish women has an undergraduate degree.   (Note:  The 
rate is actually 10.6 percent, according to Turkish official 
statistics.  End Note.) 
 
5.  (C) Because most Auxiliary members are new to politics, 
the Auxiliary conducts informative workshops on such issues 
as how politics work, democracy, lobbying, political history, 
economics, foreign relations, how to run a political meeting, 
and how to take minutes. Kavaf says that politics is not the 
only thing that people need to learn.  She advocates more 
religious training country-wide because people "mistakenly 
blame religion (Islam) for lots of things." 
 
6.  (C) The AK Party is against instituting a quota system 
for female parliamentarians.  Kavaf, too, is against it, 
arguing that if there was a quota, women would only be 
elected to satisfy the numbers.  (Comment:  In Turkey, with 
rare exception, parliamentary candidates are usually 
appointed by the party leadership, not by voters in party 
primaries.  The party could adopt a gender quota for 
leadership positions (like the U.S. Republican and Democratic 
National Committees) or parliamentary candidate lists, but it 
does not.  End Comment.) 
 
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The Real Workers in the Grassroots Machine 
------------------------------------------- 
 
7. (C)  The AK Party, drawing on an approach honed by its 
predecessor, the "Milli Gorus" political Islam movement of 
Necmettin Erbakan, is well known for its active women who get 
out and garner the grassroots votes.  Ankara's Mamak and 
Altindag neighborhoods are the poorest areas in the city. 
Women from both district AK Party Auxiliaries comb the 
neighborhoods looking for people and families who are in need 
of help and then providing that help, whether it be securing 
employment, obtaining medical care for the ill, outfitting 
children for school (such as buying clothes and school 
supplies, and even arranging free haircuts), handing out coal 
in the winter months, and delivering food to the hungry. 
 
8.  (C)  The AK Party women also support social activities. 
Mamak Auxiliary President Nagehan Muyan said that she had 
decided that this year either she or someone on her staff 
would attend all the weddings in Mamak.  Leyla Arik, 
President of the Altindag group, invited us to a potluck 
picnic at a local park--the group was securing bus service to 
and from the park for women and children from the 
neighborhood.  She indicated that this was not the first and 
would not be the last function the Auxiliary plans. 
 
9.  (C)  Realizing the importance of education, both the 
Mamak and Altindag Auxiliaries provide access for local women 
to literacy and child-rearing courses.  There is great 
interest and high demand for the courses, says Muyan.  Mamak 
Mayor Gazi Sahin has even attended the child-rearing course 
and took great delight in explaining to us how to diaper a 
baby. 
 
10. (C)  Behind (or above) this grassroots machine is usually 
a male foreman, i.e., the Provincial or Sub-Provincial 
Chairman.  Though these chairmen seem to be supportive of the 
Women's Auxiliary, it is interesting to note that after 
meeting with the Women's Groups in Mamak, Cubuk, and 
Altindag, the men in the party knew the content of the 
meetings (even sitting in on the Cubuk meeting), evidenced by 
comments by Sub-Provincial Chairmen in each district to us. 
PolOff has tried several times to meet with Ankara's 
Yenimahalle Women's Auxiliary.  One meeting was canceled 
because we had not seen the higher-ups yet.  Requests for 
subsequent meetings were put off until just recently after 
Yenimahalle's AK Party Sub-Provincial Chairman, Hamdi 
Balaban, indicated that he had "approved" the meeting.  This 
is further evidence that the men in AK Party have the real 
control over the Women's Auxiliaries. 
 
------------------------------------------- 
Why They Love the Brave Hawk (Er-dogan) 
------------------------------------------- 
 
11.  (C)  We have been struck by the absolute reverence of 
the party members for PM Erdogan.  More than several asserted 
that the PM regards women very highly.  Nagehan Muyan claimed 
the success of the AK Party comes from the top down. 
Seemingly star-struck Muyan gushed that PM Erdogan favors the 
Mamak district because he always comes there for the first 
breaking of the fast (iftar) during Ramadan. Nurdan Sanli, 
the Ankara Provincial President, and several of her board 
members were positively giddy as they tried to assert to us 
how the PM respects them and all women. (Note:  Selma Kavaf 
has made the same assertion in every meeting with us.) 
 
12.  (C)  The reason for this adoration of Erdogan is 
two-fold.  First, Erdogan is a tall, dark, mustachioed and 
athletic (a former minor league soccer player):  the epitome 
of Prince Charming in the minds of many women of Anatolian 
roots.  Second, in addition to claiming to represent strong 
"family values" and "clean" (AK) government, Erdogan has 
delivered tangible policy benefits to women.  For example, 
the AK government has mandated that welfare payments be paid 
directly to mothers, not to their husbands, who Erdogan 
himself has publicly accused of sometimes squandering the 
money in coffeehouses. 
 
---------------------------- 
Who Are These Women Anyway? 
---------------------------- 
 
13. (C) Selma Kavaf was re-elected as National Director of 
the AK Party Women's Branch at the AK Party Women's 
Convention in early May.  She asserts that 25,000 people 
attended the convention, three-fourths of them women. 
Although not a founding member of her party, she claims to be 
a "believer" and touts the party verbiage. 
 
14. (C) Kavaf hails from the southwestern city of Denizli, 
known for its more Aegean (Western) orientation and proximity 
to the calcified pools of Pamukkale, a popular tourist 
destination.  She is a former "Turkology" teacher (Comment: 
A term Turkish language and literature teachers use.  End 
Comment), married and has at least one teenage son, though 
she was not forthcoming in personal details.  She did 
acknowledge, however, that although she was on the list of 
candidates for the November 2002 election, she was too low on 
the list of candidates from her district to win a 
parliamentarian seat.  (Comment:  She ran in Denizli 
Province, which is entitled to seven seats in parliament.  AK 
Party men won four seats and CHP men won three.  This means 
that not a single woman was on the top half of AK Party's 
list in Denizli.  End Comment.)  Mixing a dull bureaucratic 
style with a certain admonitory manner, she maintains a 
modest appearance, blandly dressed, no makeup, and does not 
wear a turban. Several contacts assert that Selma Kavaf is 
only the chairman of the Women's Auxiliary by virtue of her 
bare head.  Sema Ramazanoglu, her sister, is rumored to be 
the real brains behind the operations, but because the party 
wants the Women's Auxiliary to put on a "good face" for 
secularists and Westerners, she was not elected (promoted). 
 
15. (C) When we visited Sivas last fall, Suheyla Akkas was 
the acting chairwoman of the AK Party Women's Auxiliary for 
the Sivas Province.  She is an intelligent, attractive, and 
ambitious young woman in her early twenties.  She has long 
dark hair which she does not cover and wears stylish western 
clothing.  She had recently graduated from law school, 
but--as with many college graduates--had been unable to find 
a job that fully utilized her talents.  Her brother, however, 
is the chairman of the Sivas Provincial AK Party and she 
appeared to owe her position to his influence.  She was 
polite and tried to sound modern, but she was not always 
successful in hiding her anger with U.S. foreign policy. 
Despite her western appearance, she harbored many of the same 
anti-American prejudices and conspiracy theories that we hear 
all too often from AK Party members.  (Comment:  It should be 
noted that this meeting took place during the height of 
anti-American sentiment in the fall of 2004 and occurred 
during the same week an American NBC television crew caught 
video of an American marine shooting a wounded Iraqi in a 
mosque in Fallujah.  This NBC video received extensive 
coverage in Turkey.  End Comment.) 
 
16.  (C)  Leyla Arik, Altindag Women's Auxiliary President, 
is a young, pretty turban-wearing woman who grew up in poor 
Ankara neighborhood of Altindag.  She is newly married, 
having met her husband at their place of employment--a local 
grocery store.  A high school grad, she is intelligent and 
well-spoken.  This is her first foray into the world of 
politics.  She admitted that she has a lot to learn about 
politics and the running of a political party, but claimed 
that higher-ups in the Women's Auxiliary supported her. 
Although she is much younger than the women on the Altindag 
board, it was evident that she is respected by her sisters. 
 
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The Votes are In the Bag 
------------------------- 
 
17.  (C)  COMMENT:  For many Turkish women, especially those 
from pious families inclined to vote AK Party, membership in 
the Women's Auxiliary provides a socially-acceptable 
opportunity to get out of the house, interact with peers, and 
engage in a type of work the women find morally and 
psychologically satisfying. 
 
18.  (C)  COMMENT CONTINUED:  The AK Party Women's Auxiliary 
officers and regular members are happy to be working for the 
AK Party.  For most of the women, this is their first 
experience working in/for a political party.  All the women 
we talked to feel they are making a difference in their 
districts.  The women have convinced themselves that PM 
Erdogan realizes their importance and actually listens to 
them.  Whether PM Erdogan (or any other man in AK Party) does 
truly acknowledge and value these women or the Women's 
Auxiliary is a separate issue; the perception that he does is 
enough for these women.  In other words, although we have 
seen evidence throughout the country that the Women's 
Auxiliary is being exploited by the men running the party, 
the women assert they do not see it that way and they 
themselves derive social, psychological, and, in some cases, 
economic benefits from membership in the AK Party Women's 
Auxiliary.  The AK Party women reach out and offer palpable 
help to the voters--something we have not seen other parties 
do. As long as the benefaction continues and opposition 
parties do not wise up and implement similar door-to-door 
strategies, the AK Party women will continue to secure the 
votes.  END COMMENT. 
MCELDOWNEY