Word: turkish
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...United States. Turkey's President isn't even directly elected by the voters - he or she is chosen by the elected parliament - and the office carries limited powers. Still, the President does have the power to veto legislation, and is also considered an important symbol of the Turkish state. That's why the nomination for President this week by Turkey's ruling party of the country's Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gul, has reopened fierce debates about the place of Islam in the ferociously secular Turkish state...
...point out. And his wife wears a traditional Islamic headscarf. (In fact, she petitioned the European Court of Human Rights to declare unconstitutional Turkey's law banning headscarves in public buildings, although she later dropped the case.) If her husband is confirmed, Mrs. Gul would be the only Turkish First Lady ever to cover her hair in this way. By contrast, the incumbent, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a former judge and staunch secularist, has routinely wielded his veto to block AKP initiatives he deemed too Islamist...
...Such fears may be exaggerated, however, since Turkey's institutions have potent safeguards against the introduction of political Islam. And the powerful Turkish military, self-appointed guardians of the secularist state, stands ready to intervene should those safeguards be breached. (It did so a decade ago by removing Gul's former party from government.) The AKP has so far been reluctant to introduce any changes that might provoke the wrath of the generals. At a rare press conference prior to this week's nomination of Gul, the hawkish army chief Yasar Buyukanit warned that a Turkish President must have secular...
...have become even more dramatic. The plains around Arbil--once a glaring semidesert wasteland--are exploding with luxury housing developments. They have names like British Village, which resembles a gated California suburb, and Dream City, which supposedly will have its own conference center, supermarket and American-style school. The Turkish developers of Naz City, a high-rise condominium complex, are trying to sell house-proud Kurds on modern apartment living. An American company wants to build Iraq's first ski resort in the mountains near the Turkish and Iranian borders. While citizens in Baghdad struggle to survive, a sign...
...GRECO-TURKISH TENSIONS Turkey banned the site for three days after a Greek user allegedly posted a clip calling the founder of modern Turkey--Mustafa Kemal Ataturk--a homosexual. The stir caused a virtual video war to break out, as Greeks and Turks posted YouTube clips insulting one another...