After a subway official chastised a young couple in Ankara for kissing in public, internet activists organized a small flashmob at the Kurtuluş metro station in the Turkish capital, where lots of couples engaged in a public display of affection. They attracted the ire of a group of religious men, but were protected by the police.
Liveleakvideo has raw footage:
Turkey’s society is deeply divided between urban middle and upper middle class youth who differ little from their European peers in their interests and activities, and more conservative small-town populations or rural labor migrants into the big cities, whose mores are more like those of people elsewhere in the Middle East. Of course, there are small-town secularists and big-city fundamentalists, too– it is a big complex society of 74 million people (falling between France and Germany demographically).
Since 2002, a conservative, pro-market government tinged with religious commitments has been in power, after decades of rule by militantly secular governments that favored a large public sector. The eclipse of secularism has caused deep resentments and grievances among some in the urban middle classes.
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