Source: The Independent

Ahmet Yildiz photo via The Independent

Ahmet Yildiz, 26, a physics student who represented his country at an international gay gathering in San Francisco last year, was shot leaving a cafe near the Bosphorus strait this week. Fatally wounded, the student tried to flee the attackers in his car, but lost control, crashed at the side of the road and died shortly afterwards in hospital.

"He fell victim to a war between old mentalities and growing civil liberties," Sedef Cakmak told The Independent's reporter, Nicholas Birch. Cakmak is a friend of Yildiz and a member of the gay rights lobby group Lambda.

"I feel helpless," Cakmak said, "We are trying to raise awareness of gay rights in this country, but the more visible we become, the more we open ourselves up to this sort of attack."

Yildiz's murder is a sign of Turkey's deepening friction between an increasingly liberal society and its entrenched conservative traditions, Birch reports.

Turkey was all but closed to the world until 1980 but its desire for European Union membership has imposed strains on a society formerly kept on a tight leash. As the notion of rights for minorities such as women and gays has blossomed, the country's civil society becomes more vibrant by the day. But the changes have brought a backlash from traditionalist circles wedded to the old regime.

Bungled efforts by a religious-minded government to loosen the grip of Turkey's authoritarian version of secularism have triggered a court case aimed at shutting the ruling party down, with a verdict expected within a month.

Against this backdrop, the issues of women's rights, sexuality and the place of religion in the public arena have been particularly contentious. Ahmet Yildiz's crime, his friends told The Independent, was to admit openly to his family that he was gay.

"From the day I met him, I never heard Ahmet have a friendly conversation with his parents," one close friend and near neighbor recounted. "They would argue constantly, mostly about where he was, who he was with, what he was doing."

Shortly after coming out this year, Yildiz went to a prosecutor to complain that he was receiving death threats. The case was dropped. Five months later, he was dead. The police are now investigating his murder. For gay rights groups, the student's inability to get protection was a typical by-product of the indifference, if not hostility, with which a broad swathe of Turkish society views homosexuality.

While his death may be unique, Yildiz is by no means the first victim of widespread homophobia, The Independent reports. When an Istanbul court decided to close down the city's largest gay rights group late this May, commentators took the decision as evidence of a crackdown on the community spearheaded by Turkey's current religious-minded government. Lambda Istanbul had been taken to court by the Istanbul governor's office on the grounds that it was "against the law and morality".

However, many gay activists are reluctant to draw a connection with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), noting it was the first party in Turkey's history to send a deputy to attend a conference on gay rights. This year's Gay Pride parade in Istanbul was the largest ever, they also point out. Long active in more liberal parts of western Turkey, gay groups are even beginning to meet relatively openly in the conservative east of the country where Ahmet Yildiz came from.

But according to the former neighbor, the physics student's blank refusal to hide who he was in any way may have been too much for his family.

So-called "honor killings" continue to be a grim reality wherever conservative social mores resist the rule of law.

In Turkey, a recent government study estimated that around 1,000 honor killings have been committed in the past five years. The victims are mostly young women, murdered by male relatives for transgressing chauvinistic social rules.

Honor killings have not so far really targeted gay men, although in 2006 a wave of anti-gay killings took place in Iraq, carried out by fanatical Islamist militias. A Jordanian man was shot and wounded by his brother in 2004, apparently for being gay.

Full article: Was Ahmet Yildiz the victim of Turkey's first gay honour killing? | The Independent