Recently, Turkish officials have drawn severe criticism from feminists and human rights advocates around the world for calling for the country to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention—the first major international agreement criminalizing gender-based violence.
The debate has been framed as an internal issue, similar to other cases where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made sensationalist statements to shore up his conservative, nationalist base. It is certainly not treated as a foreign policy concern. However, it is symbolic of a systemic problem within the Turkish state—one that has serious implications for Turkey’s role in Syria.
State-sponsored prejudice towards women is an indisputable reality in Turkey today. Erdogan has personally stated on multiple occasions that he believes women to be second-class citizens. Another official from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has said that women should not be allowed to laugh in public, and an AKP MP has been credibly accused of assaulting and murdering a domestic worker. The party has repeatedly tried to introduce a law that would allow rapists to receive prison reduced sentences by marrying their underage victims.
The most recent crackdown on Kurds and dissidents has also threatened women’s rights. Turkey’s politicized judicial system considers quotas adopted by the pro-peace Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) to ensure gender parity in leadership and women’s cooperatives established in HDP-run municipalities to be examples of terrorism. Feminist activists, particularly Kurdish feminists, face regular attacks and persecution. Nearly all women’s centers established in Kurdish cities prior to 2016 were closed during the post-coup state of emergency, and journalists who report on violence against women often spend more time in jail than the men who commit the crimes in the first place.
These statements and policies have had a deadly cumulative impact. Statistics show that violence against women has skyrocketed under AKP rule. According to Anit Sayac, an online memorial for women murdered by men in Turkey, there were 123 such murders in the country in 2009, and 417 in 2019. Recently, protests have erupted across the country after a military officer who kidnapped and raped a young Kurdish woman was released after just days in prison.
Analysts and policymakers tend to ignore threats to women’s rights in favor of more traditional strategic concerns, no matter how serious these violations may be. Yet that does not mean that these issues are not relevant. Turkey’s anti-women regime is actively endangering Syrian women and threatening their ability to ensure that their voices and concerns are heard in the country’s future.
Atrocities against Syrian women committed by Turkish-backed SNA groups— from the murder of Hevrin Khalaf by Ahrar al Sharqiya to the discovery of women who had been missing for nearly two years in a black site operated by the Hamza Division in Afrin — have garnered international attention. The United Nations has accused these militias of attempting to “dismantle” advances in women’s rights made by the AANES, and of creating a “palpable fear of violence and duress” for women in occupied areas.
Turkish-backed political organizations in Syria have virtually no female leaders, and have shown little interest in taking action to protect women’s rights. When the Autonomous Administration passed landmark legislation to address gender inequality in existing Syrian law, opposition leaders called the reforms “temporary” and claimed that they were as irrelevant to the future of Syria as laws implemented by ISIS.
The Syrian Islamic Council, whose fatwas justify honor killings and sexual violence against detainees, is headquartered in Istanbul, where it faces no consequences for issuing such barbaric opinions.
As long as Turkey controls territory in Syria and holds significant political power over the opposition, it will have a disproportionate say in the country’s future. If current Turkish attitudes and policies on women’s rights are institutionalized there, Syrian women could be left with fewer legal rights and less representation than they had before the war.
Through UN Security Council Resolution 2254, member states agreed to “encourage the meaningful participation of women in the UN-facilitated political process for Syria.” Research shows that increasing women’s political participation makes peace processes more successful, and that promoting gender equality challenges extremist ideology. If Erdogan’s regime and its Syrian allies can impose their discriminatory worldview on the ground and in international negotiations, it will be difficult for the international community to keep this commitment—and for all segments of Syrian society to reap the benefits of equality.