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As so often in history, a seemingly small event unhinges a grand venture. In Turkey’s case, waiting breathlessly for a date for serious negotiations on joining the European Union, a proposed law making adultery a criminal offence has overshadowed the portentous question of the future architecture of Europe.
   The European Union passed a milestone by admitting 10 new members, mostly from the former Communist fold. After much deliberation, it gave itself a new constitution, which has still to be approved, in referenda or otherwise, in individual countries. But the question that will ultimately define Europe is still hanging fire. Will Turkey finally be given a seat at the European table?
   It was Kemal Ataturk’s dream to take his country into the modern age after he brought some coherence to the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. He abolished the Caliphate, Romanised the Turkish tongue and made secularism the new God. A country that straddles Europe and Asia is, indeed, a unique phenomenon, more so because the military became the guardians of secularism and the traditional state within a state.
   Ironically, a party with Islamist roots, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), is racing to take the country truly into Europe. Even more strikingly, this is being attempted in the post-Nine Eleven era in which Western populations tend to consider Muslims synonymous with terrorists. And Turkey is a Muslim country, despite its modern avatar.
   Indeed, Turkey presents a host of dilemmas for Europe. Is Europe an essentially Christian club? If so, is there a place for a Muslim country that would rank only next to Germany in population, were it to be admitted? But if Turkey were to be rebuffed, where would the frustrations of a people spurned by a suitor wooed for decades lead it? And would Europe, by rejecting Ankara’s claims, give sustenance to the feared clash of civilisations?
   Turkey signed an Association agreement with the then European Economic Community in 1963 and formally applied for membership four years later. A decade later, former Communist countries jumped the queue at the European Union’s Luxembourg summit but Turkey was not even considered for accession, being eventually declared a candidate in December 1999. Three years later, the EU outlined economic and political conditions before formal accession talks could begin. These relate to a functioning market economy and stable institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law and human rights.
   The AKP leader and Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been most assiduous in seeking to fulfil these conditions. Kurdish language broadcasts were introduced last June, the death penalty has been abolished and torture in prisons banned. Most remarkably, the traditional Turkish military’s dominance over governance in the shape of the National Security Council has been diluted through instituting a civilian head and giving more power to the country’s elected representatives. Besides, Ankara won European hearts by getting the breakaway Northern Cyprus administration propped up by it to vote for a UN formula for reunification, which was rejected by the Greek Cypriots who nevertheless gained admittance to the EU. The omnibus legal reform bill proposing a host of measures to bring Turkey in line with European practices was being processed by Parliament before it was stalled by the controversial adultery clause.
   Adultery was a crime under the Turkish penal code until it was deleted for men in 1996 and for women two years later. Under the new clause, adultery is to be made punishable with imprisonment while applying different yardsticks to men and women. The former must be habitual offenders to invite punishment while women must take the rap for a single transgression. At any rate, the whole concept of criminalizing adultery is abhorrent to the European conscience. Revealingly, most Turks support the proposed measure.
   Whatever the ultimate fate of the clause, it has highlighted the larger question of Turkey’s place in Europe. Some have no doubt. In the words of the father of the new European constitution, former French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing, admitting Turkey would mean “the end of Europe”. Others, including individual European Commissioners, have not been shy in expressing their outright opposition to Turkey’s accession. Although some governments such as those of Germany, Britain and even France are for Turkey, their populations are more sceptical. Still others are trying to square the circle by proposing a special status for Turkey short of full membership. In the background is also the demographic fear, that Turkey would emerge as the most populous country in the European Union, with its faster population growth crowding out Christian member states haunted by falling numbers.
   Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, who holds the rotating EU presidency, has told the first session of the new enlarged European Parliament that members should resist the temptation of succumbing to Islam phobia and must treat Turkey’s application on merit. The United States has added to the complexity of the problem in an era of strained transatlantic relations by butting in. President George W. Bush declared publicly not long ago that the EU should give Turkey a date to begin accession talks, only to invite a rebuke from France’s President Jacques Chirac, who said that it was like Europe telling the US how it should order its relations with Mexico. Not to be outdone, President Bush repeated his advice. Turkey is, of course, a member of Nato, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
   The European Commission is to report to the heads of the European Union on October 6 on Turkey’s eligibility for membership in terms of the December 2002 criteria set out in Copenhagen. Heads of government will take a decision at a meeting in the Netherlands in December. If, as seems likely, the commission gives its assent, member states will have three months to weigh the options.
   Even according to the most optimistic scenario – Erdogan has suggested that Turkey could become a member in 2012 – it will be years before the country can achieve its ambition. But the journey ahead will be bumpy and could even be aborted. It is one thing to pass reform laws, quite another to ensure their compliance. What is going for Turkey in a deeply divided Europe on its credentials is that keeping Ankara out would be worse than embracing it.

Like a man trying to stop a leaking wastepipe with a priceless Raphael drawing, the government is about to do great damage in the cause of averting damage. This impending folly is its proposed legislation on “incitement to religious hatred”. Everyone who cares about free speech - the oxygen of so many other freedoms - must shout now to stay the government’s hand, and prevent it pushing through parliament this ill-conceived, badly worded, dangerous piece of law.
   But first of all, let’s acknowledge that there is a problem with that leaking wastepipe. Particularly since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the effluent of human hatred in western societies, including Britain, has flowed more strongly against people rightly or wrongly described as “Muslims”. This ranges from casual remarks to serious agitation by the xenophobic right.
   The law has already been strengthened to address this problem. When Mark Norwood, an activist of the British National party, displayed in the window of his flat in Gobowen, a small town in Shropshire, a poster with the words “Islam out of Britain” next to a photograph of the World Trade Centre in flames, he was tried and convicted under a 2001 amendment to the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. This extended the offence of causing alarm or distress to include cases that are “racially or religiously aggravated”. The conviction was recently upheld by the European court of human rights.
   However, as Fiona McTaggart, the responsible Home Office minister, stressed in an interview for this column, while the law prevents people like Norwood from publicly offending or harassing Muslims, it does not yet stop them from inciting their followers to do so. In a curious anachronism, the British legislation on incitement to racial hatred protects Jews and Sikhs, but not Muslims. That inconsistency is a source of understandable grievance to British Muslims.
   Unfortunately, the government’s proposed solution to this real problem will only make things worse. Its new schedule 10 to the serious organised crime and police bill, which went through its third reading in the House of Commons last week, despite strong objections, and now goes to the House of Lords, would criminalise a speech, publication or performance which is “likely to be heard or seen by any person in whom they are ... likely to stir up racial or religious hatred”. Religious hatred is defined as “hatred against a group of persons defined by reference to religious belief or lack of religious belief”. That would seem to cover all the bases, especially since “religious belief” is nowhere otherwise defined.
   This loose talk cast as law is dangerous in several ways. While the government insists it’s intended only to prevent incitement against persons, not against religions, the line between criticising believers and criticising beliefs is unclear. Race and religion are quite different. There is no possible rational objection to blackness. There are many possible rational objections to religion, whether Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism or Islam, and some of the greatest thinkers in modern history have held them.
   Moreover, the legislation does not require proof of the intent to “stir up” religious hatred, merely the effect. One could credibly argue that the effect (though obviously not the intention) of the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was to stir up religious hatred, first among and then against British Muslims. “Oh no,” cry government spokespersons, “of course this law would never be used against something like the Satanic Verses.” But challenged on this point in the Commons debate last week, Mr Khalid Mahmood, a Labour MP from Birmingham, said: “In the context of Salman Rushdie, the issue was the abusive words that he deliberately used, which were written in phonetic Urdu ... “ Such issues, he suggested, should be tested in the courts.
   The effect of this law, if passed, could be to deter writers, actors or film-makers from risking offensive portrayals of Islam and other religions. Indeed, as Kenan Malik points out in the latest issue of Prospect magazine, it might even encourage offended groups to mount riotous protests. For they might think that such public disorder would be evidence in court that religious hatred had, in effect, been stirred up. While ministers hasten to assure us that prosecutions under this legislation are likely to be few and far between, a single case could produce a martyr for the far right. If, however, there are no prosecutions, the government will have raised expectations among Mr Mahmood’s constituents that will then be disappointed.
   Why do it, and why now? A cynical interpretation is that, in the run-up to a general election, New Labour is trying to woo back Muslim voters alienated by Blair’s stance on the Iraq war, the detentions without trial of British Muslims in Belmarsh prison and Guantánamo, and so on. Fiona McTaggart argued to me, with passion, that it is about the historically vital task of making the Muslim community feel secure, included and at home in Britain. One can see how, for a committed Labour minister, the two things could merge in the mind.
   Yet to impute motives for which one has no hard evidence is unfair, so let’s take the government’s case on its own terms. It’s still wrong. In a letter addressed to Salman Rushdie, as a leading voice in a formidable group of objectors put together by English PEN, Ms McTaggart wrote: “Writers and artists, like yourself, are rightly concerned about freedom of expression. The government’s prime concern is the safety and security of communities.” No! That may be her prime concern, as the minister for race equality, community policy and civil renewal, but the task of the government, in all liberal democracies, is to strike a balance between two great public goods, freedom and security. Here they are proposing too great a risk to freedom, for too uncertain a gain in security.
   There’s a simple solution to hand. In the Commons last week, the Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris proposed an amendment, originally drafted by the distinguished human rights lawyer Anthony Lester, which would change the law on incitement to racial hatred to include “reference to a religion or religious belief or to a person’s membership or presumed membership of a religious group as a pretext for stirring up racial hatred against a racial group”. Basta. Problem addressed.
   If New Labour wants to go further, then, in its historic third term, it can take two larger steps towards building a society that is both free and multicultural. It can abolish our ludicrously outmoded blasphemy law, which (notionally) protects only the Church of England. And it can disestablish the Church of England, thus allowing Prince Charles, an energetic patron of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, to be what he has said he wants to be: defender of faith, not the Faith.
   Meanwhile, there’s this bad law to be seen off. When the Lords have sent it back to the Commons, parliament has adjourned for the election, and Labour has won again, with the help of those Muslim votes, the government should quietly drop it - and pass instead the practical, careful, precise Lester/Harris amendment. That’s an appropriate piece of stout paper to stop the leak in the wastepipe. And we will save our Raphael of free speech.
   This article first appeared in The Guardian

The success of last week’s elections in Iraq has created an exciting moment of opportunity. It matters greatly that Iraq’s transition is a success. I am determined that the United Nations will play its full part in helping the Iraqi people achieve that end.
   But it also matters that a world that has been angrily divided over Iraq now recognize that we all share a common agenda: to move Iraq from the starting point — its successfully completed elections — to a peaceful, prosperous, democratic future.
   Even the scars left by past differences can be turned into opportunities. Precisely because the United Nations did not agree on some earlier actions in Iraq, it now has much- needed credibility with, and access to, Iraqi groups that must agree to join in the new political process if peace is to prevail. Now is the time for us to draw on that capital.
   I want to capture this moment, and encourage the international community to come together around Iraq through the United Nations.
   No one can fail to have been moved by the Iraqis’ display of courage at the polls. The United Nations is proud of the assistance it was able to give them, both in developing the political base for elections and in the technical preparations. We helped to draft the electoral law and to form the Independent Electoral Commission, which ran the elections. A UN electoral team of more than 50 staff in Baghdad, Amman and New, York supported the Commission. The UN trained the commission’s members and several hundred other electoral workers, who in turn trained thousands more; and we have advised and supported them throughout the process.
   I believe we can also help in the next stage — the very delicate one of building a constitution. There, too, our help must be both political and technical. Politically, my special representative Ashraf Qazi is already engaged in efforts to reach out to those groups — mainly Sunni Arabs — that stayed away from the elections, for whatever reason, but are willing to pursue their goals through peaceful negotiation and dialogue.
   Success in this effort is crucial. Some groups are bitterly resentful of the occupation, and believe they have been excluded from the political process. Every effort must be made to bring them in. The wider the spectrum of Iraqis that can be brought into the tent, the greater the chance of success.
   The new constitution will, of course, be an Iraqi constitution, and Iraqis will decide its shape. There is no question of imposing any external ideas or models that they do not like. But if they ask advice — and I believe they will — we do have considerable knowledge and experience to draw on.
   Once the draft constitution is agreed upon, a referendum is to be held, in October, to give all Iraqis the chance to pronounce on it. We would expect to be able to help the electoral commission in organizing that referendum and the subsequent parliamentary elections, just as we worked with them in preparing last week’s election and are still working with them to tabulate and verify the results.
   We can also give technical assistance to the new ministries. Many people seem to think that because, for security reasons, we have only 200 international staff people on the ground in Iraq (three quarters of whom are guards), the United Nations is not present and active there. This is quite wrong, first because the U.N. has many Iraqi staff and secondly because much of our work — training, advice, coordination, acting as a conduit for funds — can be done from outside the country.
   In fact, some 23 U.N. agencies, funds and programs are working together to coordinate international aid and help rebuild the country. Forty-six projects have been approved and funded to date, for a total of $494 million.
   In Basrah, for instance, the U.N. Development Program is providing $15 million worth of spare parts to rehabilitate the Hartha power station. Similar projects are planned for power stations in other Iraqi cities, while engineers from the ministry of electricity are being trained in Japan in a program jointly funded by Japan and Belgium. Meanwhile, in Fallujah, a group led by UNICEF has distributed some 7 million liters of potable water to more than 70,000 people displaced from their homes in the recent fighting.
   These activities are funded by the International Reconstruction Fund Facility, which the United Nations set up with the World Bank. So far 24 donors have committed about $1 billion. We must see that these commitments are honored, and the money properly spent. This can help Iraqis improve their daily lives in many tangible ways.
   Let’s not pretend it will be easy. Iraq is in a complicated region of the world, and has had a tortured recent history. It also has a very diverse society, and some groups are clearly determined to prevent a democratic outcome on any terms. But I believe that with international help, such a society can use democratic institutions to build itself a stable and prosperous future. That hope and that vision offer us in the outside world a real opportunity to start again — together — and support the Iraqi people in their great experiment.
   We have a mandate from the Security Council to take the lead in bringing that support together, and we intend to do it.
   The writer is Secretary-General of the United Nations. Courtesy: UNIC Dhaka, Bangladesh