Minister sides with female AKP deputy

ANKARA - Hürriyet Daily News

AKP Kotan applies for a restraining order against her husband. DAILY NEWS photo

A female lawmaker from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been taken under protection from her soon-to-be-ex husband, Family and Social Policies Minister Fatma Şahin said yesterday.

Fatma Salman Kotan, an AKP deputy for the eastern province of Ağrı, applied for a restraining order against her husband amid their continuing divorce case. The court granted Salman’s request and banned İdris Kotan from approaching or connecting with his wife for the next six months at the risk of being dealt a penitentiary detention.

“We are with our sister Fatma, we will give all kinds of support and we will manage the process together,” Şahin told reporters in Ankara.

Kotan, a lawmaker for the ruling party from the eastern province of Ağrı, dismissed media reports that the application for the restraining order stemmed from domestic violence in the relationship. “These [online news] portals have to apologize to me for their claims. Our divorce has nothing to do with domestic violence,” she said, refusing to elaborate on the reasons for the restraining order.

Kotan is known for her interest in gender-based violence issues. She famously applied for the Parliamentary Commission to Maintain Gender Equality and worked to form a subcommittee within it to investigate underage marriages.

Fatma Kotan is an accountant. She graduated in economics from Ataturk University in Erzurum.
Speaking at the Turkish Women Entrepreneurs Association in August 2007 she gave details of her life. “My mother was my father’s second wife. In our part of the world if a man is rich he will marry more than once. My mother died because of my father’s pressure in her to have a son. I was the second child. The doctors told my mother it would be dangerous to have a third but my mother told us she had to make my father Sheikh Ahmet Salman happy, to continue his line by having a son. The doctors said it would be fatal to get pregnant but she didn’t listen. Only a boy would make Sheikh Ahmet Salman happy. So my mother got pregnant for a third time and bore another girl. Two years later my mother died.”