By Annette Grossbongardt in Istanbul
The model, wearing a scanty bathing suit, leans back against sun-baked stones, her hip jutting playfully to the side. In one photo she even spreads her legs slightly -- suggestively. In a Europe where photos of half naked models staring alluringly out at passers-by are simply part of the cityscape, such a billboard would hardly rate a second glance. But in Turkey, the swimwear ads are far from mainstream, and they have triggered a dispute that offers a taste of just what the upcoming general election campaign might be like.
Ahead of the snap general elections -- moved up from November to July 22 due to the failed presidential candidacy of current Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül -- the issues this summer are clear. On the one side stands the Justice and Development Party (AKP), led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and to which Gül also belongs. Many secularists in Turkey, particularly the military, view the party's roots in political Islam with suspicion despite Erdogan's insistence that his party is committed to the country's constitution. On the other side are the left-leaning, strict-secularist nationalists who fill public squares each weekend with massive, anti-AKP demonstrations accusing the party of wanting to transform Turkey into a theocracy.
Land of the Mullahs?
Enter, the "Bikini Dispute," as the daily paper Vatan has called it. The primary target in the fight between the two camps is the Istanbul municipal government, led by Kadir Topas, the mayor and a member of the AKP. Some swimwear manufacturers have complained that city officials have banned certain revealing advertising posters for bikinis and bathing suits for "moral reasons."
The manufacturers call it censorship and restriction of entrepreneurial freedom. One company says it was told that the city refused to approve its billboards because the particularly salacious images would increase the risk of traffic accidents. The newspapers immediately began printing alarming reports. "Will this become a land of the mullahs, like Iran?" the liberal daily Vatan asked.
For opponents of Erdogan and the AKP, the criticism being leveled by the bathing suit manufacturers offers welcome evidence of the AKP's presumed Islamist goals. According to the Turkish press, a total of four companies were denied permits for advertising space. This, crowed Cumhuriyet, a combative, secular paper established under modern Turkey's father Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was evidence the AKP merely pays lip service to the concept of the secular state.
In an opinion piece in the liberal paper Milliyet, titled "From the Bathing Suit to the Black Full-body Veil," the author even claims, in all seriousness, that the bikini ad ban has made Istanbul a "sister city of Tehran." According to Sunset, a swimwear manufacturer, the city refused to approve some of its billboards last year. Milliyet prints an example of this supposedly offensive advertising: a photo of a relatively conservative bathing suit that barely reveals the beginnings of cleavage. Sabah, a tabloid, printed a photo of a model wearing a tiger-print bikini that featured a strip of material between the top and bottom that even covered the navel. "Prohibited," the caption read accusingly.
Atatürk in a Bathing Suit
"The agency informed us that we could save ourselves the trouble of submitting these kinds of pictures," explained Sunset CEO Kemal Günes in newspaper interviews, adding that they had been told that the photos were incompatible with Turkey's general moral principles. This prompted the company to submit new pictures of conservative-looking models showing relatively little skin. The new shots were approved, said Günes.
"We display our posters in 20 countries, so why isn't it ok here in Turkey?" says Zeki Baseskioglu, head of the company Zeki Trio. "Am I doing something that is objectionable?" The problems, says Baseskioglu, began in the late 1990s, when current Prime Minister Erdogan was still mayor of Istanbul. To protest what many perceived as censorship, one company even produced a poster of Atatürk in a bathing suit.
The Istanbul city government rejects these accusations. "There were never restrictions on this kind of advertising," Mayor Topas stated in New York, where he was attended a conference on climate change. In a press release, his office attacks critics and explains that most of the companies that had complained about the alleged policies had never even filed applications. It is "unacceptable," the document continues, for these companies to claim that they had known in advance that they would be rejected.
According to city officials, many companies have used posters to advertise their swimwear in Istanbul in recent years. They insist that Sunset's photos were approved, both this year and last, but according to the companies this only applies to the photos of the "correct" models.
Propaganda War
To support the accusations, the paper Milliyet printed excerpts from a rejection notice. The city administration, not to be outdone, released its most recent approval notice for Sunset, in which it refers to advertising rules banning depictions that glorify violence, are racist or discriminatory or problematic in other ways, as well as to compatibility with "general ethical moral rules."
Interestingly enough, the most recent advertising permit for Sunset is dated May 17, the day the accusations appeared in the press. The paper Sabah even contends that the affair could spell trouble for Prime Minister Erdogan. According to its report, the accusations have already been included in a dossier the public prosecutor's office has submitted to the country's highest court. The file apparently contains information investigators have been gathering for some time about cases in which the AKP has violated the country's fundamental secular principles. There are rumors in Ankara, Sabah writes that the investigation could even lead to proceedings to ban the AKP -- a dream for their opponents, perhaps, but not likely to ever happen.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
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