ANKARA: Turkey’s government came under fire on Thursday for favouring its own grassroots at the expense of EU-demanded democracy reforms as it went ahead with a controversial proposal to allow women to wear Islamic headscarves in universities .

In a marathon 13-hour session that stretched into the early hours of Thursday, the parliament gave its blessing to the constitutional amendments, proposed by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and backed by the opposition Nationalist Action Party (MHP), in a first round of voting.

It is all but certain that the two parties, which command 410 of the 550 seats in parliament, will succeed in pushing the reform through in a final vote slated for Saturday despite widespread objections from secularist forces in the Muslim country.

“The government has been too hasty on the reform, without considering the sensitivity the issue carries in Turkey,” said Wolfango Piccoli, an analyst at the Eurasia group, a political risk consultancy firm in London.

The secular camp, including the army, the judiciary and academics, says easing the restriction on headscarves in universities will undermine the separation of state and religion, put pressure on women to cover up and gradually open the way to lifting a similar ban in high schools and government offices.

More than 125,000 people demonstrated at the weekend against the project, amid fears that the reform is part of a plot to gradually introduce Islamic rule in Turkey.

The AKP, which has its roots in a now-banned Islamist movement, argues that the ban on headscarves imposed after the 1980 military coup is a violation of human rights.

“The problem is that the government is not undertaking any other reform. Had they made a move on democracy reforms related to Ankara’s European Union membership bid, the secularists would have had a different approach to lifting of the ban on headscarves,” Piccoli said.

Ankara has long under been pressure to rid its penal code of a controversial article that many say is an obstacle to free speech in the country and move ahead with a law easing restrictions on the property rights of non-Muslim religious foundations reforms that the MHP is not very keen on.

The government has yet to fulfil its months-long pledge to amend the penal code and the parliamentary debate on the law on non-Muslim foundations has been pushed back by the headscarf reform.

“The alliance between the AKP and the MHP on the headscarf issue is based on a decision to delay or cancel other reform plans like amending the penal code, or a broader plan for democratisation,” Ahmet Insel, an academic from Istanbul’s Galatasaray University, said.

According to Cengiz Aktar, an EU expert from the Bahcesehir University, the government’s haste to lift the ban on headscarves is a “setback” that overshadows its success in implementing a slate of democracy reforms that enabled Turkey to begin EU membership talks in 2005.

“It is a trend that doesn’t correspond any more to the reformist period. It is a return to a more authoritarian stance,” he said.

“We can say that liberties other than the right to wear a headscarf do not interest the AKP and its new accomplice the MHP,” he added.

Piccoli said the government must move ahead with democracy reforms if it wants to convince the public “that they are not adopting different standards on freedom of expression”.

The AKP says it is fully committed to secularism and the country’s EU orientation, but many here still distrust the party for its Islamist background and unsuccessful attempts to criminalise adultery and restrict sales of alcohol.—AFP