Word: headscarfs
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...police official peered into the passenger seat and took in my headscarf and shapeless clothes. "Where are you going?" he barked at my assistant, sitting at the wheel. "We are journalists, researching security conditions on the road," Ali answered. I lowered my sunglasses, thinking that my light eyes and obvious foreignness - usually a quick pass out of any brush with Afghan officialdom - would speed us through the inevitable interrogation. Instead, it only made the official more agitated. "Why don't you have a bodyguard?" he demanded. "This road is unsafe; people can be kidnapped...
...grounds for insurgents. Every so often, our driver, Sami, would yell, "Checkpoint!" Our cameras would fall to the floor, and we would try to appear innocent as weary-looking soldiers scrutinized our authorization documents in a country still suspicious of journalists' motives. There was a similar procedure for my headscarf and abaya, conservative Islamic women's attire, which I removed in "safer" regions and put on in "dangerous" ones. The black shroud was stifling but necessary camouflage in areas where most women don them and where a second look from the wrong person can still prove deadly...
...finally brought before the ICTY. I witnessed his pretrial hearing in which he prayed for the other war criminals still at large, one of whom was Karadzic. Even more unnerving was the fact that he looked nervously at me even more than at the judge, perhaps because with my headscarf I was obviously Muslim, like his victims. I sat frozen in my seat and realized that if I had been born in the wrong place at the wrong time, I could have been among them...
...March, when chief prosecutor Abdurrahman Sarikaya filed an indictment urging that the AKP be banned for anti-secularist activities. The main item of evidence he used to back the claim was a government move earlier this year to lift the ban on female students wearing headscarves at universities. The headscarf issue is almost irrationally divisive - for the pious, it's a matter of religious freedom; for the secularists, it symbolizes a political movement they insist threatens their lifestyle. The government's approach to the issue - introducing the change overnight, with no public debate - was widely criticized, and it spurred...
...next week - a verdict requires 7 out of 11 votes. They are largely a staunchly secularist group, with an aversion to the politics of Erdogan and company. But the judges are also bound to weigh the evidence on legal grounds and decide whether the government's actions, regarding the headscarf and other matters, warrant such drastic action...