The army’s declaration on Feb. 28, 1997, when the coalition led by then Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan’s Welfare Party was presented with an ultimatum that led to the collapse of the government, targeted what the generals viewed as overtly religious policies.
It led to a situation that had wide-ranging repercussions across Turkish society, especially for women who choose to wear the headscarf.
Kubra Y. was a 23-year-old law student at Istanbul University when Erbakan’s reforms -- which had allowed thousands of head-scarfed women to attend university for the first time -- were reversed.
Kubra, who asked for her surname not to be published, told Anadolu Agency how she was forced out of education and saw her promising career put on hold until 2011, when the Justice and Development (AK) Party ended the ban on headscarves in universities.
“We are a lost generation with our hopes and dreams stolen,” she said. “I had always wanted to study law as I believed I could help establish the justice that society needed. It was my biggest dream.”
The block on her academic career was a serious blow for a young woman from Istanbul whose poor family had struggled to send her to university.
“Words cannot describe the happiness of a poor teenager who achieved getting into university,” she said.
“And words cannot describe the injustice, humiliation and despair of a university student who was thrown out of classes because of her beliefs.”
Even before the military’s intervention against the Welfare Party’s Islam-inspired policies, Kubra said she had fought during her education against “those who were getting more disturbed each day as the number of educated Muslim youth increased”.
A series of diktats from the military-dominated National Security Council were aimed at forming a more secular government led by Erbakan’s coalition partner Tansu Ciller, of the center-right True Path Party.
Enemies of religion
However, President Suleyman Demirel asked Mesut Yilmaz, leader of the Motherland Party, to form a new government.
This new administration set about enforcing the council’s orders.
Private schools or foundations with suspected links to religious or conservative groups were shut down and the roles of openly religious people in public institutions and life -- whether it be politics, universities, the civil service, judiciary or military -- were restricted.
The ban on the headscarf was the most obvious manifestation of these policies and was the issue around which protest formed.
Across Turkey, demonstrations led to violence as the police used batons and tear gas to quell the outrage of pious crowds.
“I was actively involved in most of these protests and projects to stand against the tyrants,” Kubra told Anadolu Agency.
Istanbul University’s campus in Beyazit Square was the scene of many clashes with the police over the years. “First, we were accused of holding illegal protests and later they called us terrorists,” Kubra said.
“I suspect that the police officers sent to stop us were specifically chosen from among the enemies of religion. They did not care what we were fighting for -- they treated us so cruelly.”
Kubra, now a mother of three, described how her headscarf was burned at one demonstration and how another time she was hospitalized after being beaten by police.
“The most difficult thing in life is to fight such a mentality of hatred,” she said.
Persuasion rooms
Tuba K. was another of the thousands of young women whose dreams of a career were interrupted by the coup.
Now aged 42 and teaching at a private school in the central province of Konya, she graduated from university eight years late because of her refusal to remove her headscarf.
“It was such a humiliating moment,” she said of the time she was banned from final year classes at the geography teaching department of Selcuk University in Konya.
“We were asked to submit new photos showing us uncovered during final year registration in 1998,” she told Anadolu Agency. “Some friends found female photographers, while others photoshopped their pictures to make themselves look bareheaded.
“But the problems were just beginning. One day, a lecturer came in and asked all the covered students to leave the classroom. He, however, promised that he would not record us as absent. And he was the most tolerant one.
“All the other lecturers just took the minutes which would inform the administration that we were not obeying the rules.”
Official warnings were followed by reprimands, which later turned into weekly and monthly suspensions from the university, Tuba said.
“You do not have another option -- you will either take off your headscarves or we will interrupt your education,” she quoted lecturers as telling covered students.
Those who refused to abandon their religion and remove their headscarves were forced to attend “persuasion rooms” as the authorities attempted to break their resistance.
“They were all afraid for their own careers,” she said of the teachers who tried to enforce the ban.
Careers on hold
As in Istanbul and other cities, police were soon a regular sight on campus and officers were ordered to prevent covered students from entering university buildings.
“After a month-long suspension from school, I went to see what my friends like me were doing,” Tuba said. “To my surprise, I saw that most of them were taking off their headscarves at the entrance to the campus and others were wearing wigs.
“Police were shouting to them to be quick and treating them in an inhuman way. What a horrible and shameful situation this was?”
Tuba dropped out of university until 2005, when parliament passed a law allowing those who had been excluded from university to return to their studies -- although she still had to remove her headscarf.
However, she remained unable to pursue a teaching career until 2013, when the ban on headscarves in public institutions was lifted.
Like many other women whose careers were put on hold, Tuba now wants some form of restitution for those charged with offenses such as terrorism or making religious propaganda during the post-1997 period.
For women like her and Kubra, there have been lesser but still perceivable injustices.
Because of the delay in her law studies, Kubra is now too old to start a career as a judge while Tuba had to pass the KPSS public service exam before taking up teaching -- something she would not have had to do if she had graduated earlier.
However, they take consolation in the fact that even women in the armed forces are free to wear the headscarf now.
It was not just covered women who fell victim to the crackdown on religion.
Tragic period
Yasar Degirmenci was heading an investigations unit in the Directorate of National Education’s office in Eyup, Istanbul, when he was sacked in 1998 over his “sympathy for covered students and teachers”.
At the time, nearly 15,000 teachers were suspended, discharged or forced to resign. Degirmenci’s opposition to such action marked him out for dismissal.
“I did nothing against the law,” he told Anadolu Agency. “It was my ideology and [my] legitimate fight against the headscarf ban that got me dismissed.”
He was eventually reinstated years later. “It was such a tragic period in Turkey from every point of view,” Degirmenci said.
He said none of the politicians, generals, judges and journalists from the late 1990s media “have yet accounted for what they did back in those days”.
Outside of education, pious Muslims in the armed forces also bore the brunt of the measures.
Officers whose mothers wore the headscarf or whose fathers were bearded were unable to invite their parents to their own weddings and hundreds of others were dismissed from service.
Degirmenci also criticized the “so-called religious people” who failed to stand against the generals’ injustice. “Muslims failed the test as they were concerned about their own futures and interests,” he said. “February 28 destroyed the nation's structure and its values.”
Kubra also warned against complacency, which could allow similar oppression to return.
“Never become listless,” she told Anadolu Agency. “There will always be tyrants.”