Word: symbols
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...Prime Minister material. For now, though, he intends to keep up whatever pressure he can on Musharraf. Despite a phalanx of armed police at the entrance to his street in Lahore, he occasionally manages to smuggle out letters and opinion pieces. Even in confinement, he remains a powerful symbol for pro-democracy activists. Protesters regularly gather in front of his empty residence in Islamabad to launch fresh demonstrations. Each time they are met with an increasingly violent police response. During a demonstration on Feb. 9, riot police added a water cannon to their usual barrage of batons and tear...
...society and a serious threat to a non-religious public life. While the ban may seem anathema to Western liberal countries that prioritize freedom of religious exercise, the unique political and demographic characteristics of Turkey have made the ban quite appropriate, especially as the headscarf has become a political symbol of religious conservatism. The issue here is not simply the rights of individual women to don the headscarf in the classroom, but what impact the repeal will have on women’s rights and secularism in the broader context of Turkey’s political climate. Despite the seemingly...
...gloves are finally off. After years of sidestepping one of the most sensitive social issues in Turkey, the ruling Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) has moved to lift a ban on young women wearing headscarves at universities. The country's secularists, who see the headscarf as a symbol of political Islam, are up in arms over the proposed reform. The debate is the latest installment in the ongoing and increasingly bitter tug of war between the government and a militantly secularist establishment long used to getting...
...Prime Minister Erdogan, an often blustery and impatient politician, has done little to ease the tension. "If [the headscarf] is indeed a political symbol, does that make it a crime to wear it? Is wearing a symbol a crime?," he said at the start of this debate last month. To secularists, his words confirmed their worst fears - that the headscarf is not an expression of religious piety but of a political movement that ultimately seeks to impose Islamic law. Thousands of secularists, mostly women, took to the streets in the capital of Ankara last week chanting "Turkey will not become...
...last November's election, an apology was one of Labor's key campaign promises. "Simply saying that you're sorry is such a powerful symbol," said now-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, "powerful simply because it restores respect." Opposition Indigenous Affairs spokesman Tony Abbott said Jan. 30, "We are skeptical as to what a formal apology will achieve... I think it would be fair to say we don't regard this as anything like the highest priority in indigenous affairs...