In Turkey's heartland, support for EU is high, but it's almost all about getting rich

Here's an article from the Turkish Daily News, December 13th, 2004:

In Turkey's heartland, support for EU is high, but it's almost all about getting rich

LOUIS MEIXLER

SAKARKAYA - The Associated Press

In this mountain village near the Syrian border, chickens scurry across snow-sprinkled paths, horses trudge through mud to haul firewood to homes, and men huddle outside to puff on cigarettes - but there are no women in sight.
Like many people in overwhelmingly Muslim Turkey, village leader Mehmet Cetin says his hopes for the future rest on the European Union, which he says will invest in factories and transform the village from one of poor sugar-beet and wheat farmers to a place where workers earn hefty salaries like their relatives who have emigrated to Germany.

But ask him whether his eagerness to join the EU means he's willing to let his sons and daughters adopt European culture and Cetin becomes quiet.
"They can take things from our culture and religion," he says.
For Cetin and many of his fellow villagers, accession to the EU holds out the promise of greater wealth, but also poses a cultural threat: The possibility of Turkish children adopting European values that many Turks see as unacceptably permissive, where girls ignore their fathers' wishes and boys shirk family responsibilities.
Polls show that some 70 percent of Turks favor the country's EU bid, but also indicate that a strong majority see Europe as a challenge to conservative, Islamic values that remain deeply entrenched throughout the nation.
Next Friday in Brussels, European leaders are widely expected to give Turkey a date to begin accession talks, a dialogue that will force both Turkey and Europe to face the challenge of how to integrate an overwhelming Muslim country with traditions that are different from those of the rest of Europe.

In no area is this dichotomy stronger than in the Anatolian heartland, which is dotted with places like Sakarkaya, a village of 1,600 people with unpainted cinderblock homes that often have roofs made of branches covered with mud.
Chickens run through the streets hunting for seeds and men in wool caps and baggy black pants called shalvar loiter on street corners. Women mostly stay inside and wear traditional headscarves. The only access to the village is from a five kilometer (three mile) dirt road that winds through the mountains.

Central Anatolia is a bastion of support for the ruling Justice and Development Party, a conservative, Islamic-rooted party that has spearheaded the country's EU drive by implementing measures that have improved human rights, reformed the legal system and reduced the power of the military in government. In the last election, 465 of the village's 700 voters gave their support to the Justice party.
"If they (the Justice party) take further steps toward the EU, it will jeopardize their own values," said Ayse Ayata, a political scientist at Middle East Technical University.

Sakarkaya illustrates other key problems that the EU and Turkey face.
Almost a third of Turkey's 70 million people live in the rural countryside and European countries are afraid that EU membership could lead to a flood of poor Turks seeking jobs. There are already some 4 million Turks living and working in the EU - including 50 families from Sakarkaya. Most of the village's emigrants left in the 1970s and live in Germany.

The village's location some 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of the Syrian border underscores another thorny political question - whether Europe is ready to extend its borders to three nations that have a history of instability: Syria, Iran and Iraq.
But to most villagers here, EU membership holds no such complications; it simply represents a road to riches.
"I've heard that every family in Europe has a doctor. If we enter the EU, the village will get a doctor," Cetin said.
In Europe, however, the issue of Turkish membership is inextricably linked with questions of identity.
"The prospect of Turkish accession obliges us to face fundamental questions about who we are, on which shared values is our union based and what model of society we want," European Parliament President Josep Borrell told Turkey's parliament last week.
That question came to the forefront in October, when members of Erdogan's party pressed for legislation that would criminalize adultery. They backed down, but only under EU pressure.
Further progress toward the EU could lead to strains within the governing party, with more conservative members balking at European demands for reform or trying to introduce Islamic-oriented measures.
In Sakarkaya, tradition still dominates life.

Cetin's wife, Emine, and eldest daughter, Gulsum, both wear headscarves. Emine only entered the living room where Cetin was speaking with a reporter to stoke the fire in their wood-burning stove and serve lunch.
Gulsum left school when she was 11. Now, at age 18, she is engaged.

As Cetin and his friend, Ali Ketbulga, walked down the street, villagers stopped to greet them and shake their hands. "Germans are not like this," said Ketbulga, who worked in Germany and Poland for 17 years before returning in 1996. "They are not warm and friendly."
"In Turkey, children obey their parents. If they say 'don't go there,' they listen," Ketbulga added.
But like most of Turkey, whose gross domestic product has doubled in the past decade to reach Euro5,900 (US$7,800) last year, Sakarkaya has changed immeasurably in the past few decades.
When Cetin was a boy, the village had no running water or electricity. Today, his small, cramped living room is only a cement floor covered by cushions, but in the corner there is a television and a recharger for his cell phone.
Some girls have taken to wearing pants, something unheard of in the past.
The village chief left school when he was 11, but his three boys and one of his daughters, Fatma, attend a boarding high school in the regional city of Kahramanmaras. In the 1970's "we didn't have even one university student in our village, Ketbulga said. Now, about half a dozen villagers go to university each year.

"The villages are changing through media and migration," said Helga Tilic, a sociology professor at Middle East Technical University. "People are not living isolated anymore."