Women to turn their backs on AKP at the ballot box

2015-06-04 11:25:03

ANKARA (DİHA) - Women's groups denounced the latest example of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's virulently anti-woman discourse. They say women will give the President the necessary response at the ballot box in Turkey's election, coming up this Sunday.

Since Erdoğan called a group of women in Iğdır who turned their backs on him in protest "immoral" and "impudent" and said threateningly that "our manners don't permit this," women across the country have been decrying the President. The sexist language in Iğdır was the latest in a long history of such remarks from Erdoğan, including questioning Gezi protestors' virginity to discredit their protest and saying he didn't believe that women's and men's equality was in "nature."

Benazir Coşkun, of the Women's Coordination of the Socialist Democracy Party (SDP), noted that oppressing women was the AKP'sand the "rape state's" most reliable way of reinforcing its own power throughout its 12 years in power." At the same time, this shows that they knowtheir end has come, and can see that women's willpower is behind it," said Coşkun. "The more they see this, the more they use rapist language and practice."

Gözde Kaya, a member of the group New Democratic Woman (YDK), said the real reason underlying Erdoğan's most recent sexist remark was the fear that women's grassroots, highly mobilized elections organizing for the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) had struck in him.

Ayşen Kavas, of the platform "We Will Stop Women Homicides," said that by now, Erdoğan has shown his sexism to people around the world. She called it "unacceptable" that Erdoğan referred to women's most basic democratic right to protest as "immoral.""In Turkey, if a woman wants to get a divorce, to work, to do politics, to laugh, not to have children, the AKP declares her 'immoral,'" said Kavas. "That homicides of women have come to this point because of these ideas is clear."

Kavas said Erdoğan, "shouldn't wonder at all: women will be turning their backs to the anti-woman AKP at the ballot box."

(cm/nt)