Turkey: fundamentalists forbid girl in shorts to board bus

(ANSAmed) - ANKARA, JUNE 12 - A new incident of religious intolerance has taken place in Istanbul where a girl accused she was prohibited from boarding a bus by a group of fundamentalist Islamists because she was dressed with shorts and a t-shirt and did not have her head covered by a veil.



Evrensel newspaper reports that Yagmur Yilmaz, 21 years old, said that just as every day she had wanted to get the bus for Fatih, in the centre of Istanbul, at the Edirnekapi stop, but that she had been blocked by about fifteen fundamentalists, men and women, dressed with turbans and burqas. ''They prohibited me from getting on, telling me I couldn't enter.'' One woman said that if I had entered they would all have found themselves ''in a situation of sin'' while another man shouted at her ''shame on you!''. Yagmur also pointed out that on the bus there were other people, other women without a veil, but that ''nobody reacted''.



''I was in sweatpants and a t-shirt, but nobody should have reacted like that even if I had been wearing a miniskirt'' the girl protested: ''it was an awful aggression which should never have taken place.'' According to the progress opposition and the lay associations, there is a ''rampant Islamisation'' going on in Turkey under the government of nationalist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (ANSAmed).



