Turkey between Islam and Ataturkism - Part 2

Welfare Party Leads Turkey

In 1995, the pro-Islamist Welfare Party won elections and it's leader Necmettin Erbakan headed the first pro-Islamic government since 1923. The Islamic Welfare Party formed the largest opposition party in parliament and in the general elections in December 1995, it took more than 20% of the vote. The Welfare party led a government coalition for one year.

However, Turkey's military grew increasingly angered by what it saw as Welfare's attempts to Islamise the country, accusing the party of secretly planning to introduce Islamic rule. The party is also accused of being a centre of fundamentalist activities and undermining the secular foundations of the Turkish constitution. Mr. Erbakan was accused of pursuing anti-secularist policies. Less than a year after he took office, he was forced to step down after pressure by the strictly secularist army!

Turkey's main Islamic political party, Welfare, was banned in August 1998. Mr. Erbakan was banned from politics for five years. He was not able to lead, or even join, the Virtue Party, which his supporters founded after his downfall. It was the third time a party led by Mr. Erbakan had been banned: the National Order Party was banned in 1971 after a military coup, and the National Salvation Party was shut down in 1980 - also after a coup. The pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party had also been banned and closed.

There has been an intense campaign against the Welfare Party ever since it was forced out of government. The Party has been criticised for promoting religious schools and encouraging women to wear the veils. The party was accused of making unwise alliances abroad and trying to create a religious state. Mr. Erbakan, suggested that Turkey head a union of Islamic nations. He visited some Arab and Islamic countries so as to build closer ties with them. In November, 2000, the Turkish Appeal Court has rejected an appeal by Necmettin Erbakan, against a one-year jail sentence for inciting racial hatred. The human rights group, Amnesty International said it will designate Mr. Erbakan as a prisoner of conscience if he is jailed.

Prosecutors cited the 1994 election campaign speech in which Mr. Erbakan railed against the secularist establishment, accusing it of dividing Turks and Kurds by replacing Islam-based public life with a secular and nationalist ideology. He also attacked the fact that Turkish students opened their school day by reciting nationalist slogans and not Qur'anic verses!

The court in March 2000 found Mr. Erbakan guilty of inciting religious hatred in a speech he gave in 1994. Under Turkish law, the party's assets, which are already frozen, are liable for seizure by the Finance Ministry. The Turkish Appeal court has upheld a one year jail sentence imposed on Mr. Necmettin Erbakan. Mr. Erbakan after being banned from active politics for five years, is still the leading light of the Islamist movement.

Although, the Welfare Party was forced out of government and closed down, it remained the largest party in parliament. The support for this party remains strong and the Welfare Party was again re-born. Mr. Erbakan is the driving force behind the new pro-Islamic Parties.

The Virtue Party:

Welfare's successor, the Virtue Party, also faced the closure by a court on charges of trying to replace the modern constitution with one based on Islamic Sharia law. Virtue leader, Recai Kutan, said the verdict to close the party was a "a blow to Turkey's search for democracy and law". The Virtue Party has become the latest in a series of pro-Islamic parties to be closed down under Turkey's strictly secular system. The court ordered that Virtue's assets should be handed over to the treasury.

This decision was hoped to mark the end of an era, stretching back three decades, in which political Islam in Turkey was represented by a single party. Virtue was widely seen as more moderate than some of its pro-Islamic predecessors. The party did not call for an Islamic state, but pressed for a relaxation of secular laws which, for example, forbid women working in government offices or students from wearing Islamic-style head scarves.

As Hasan Koni of Ankara University notes, the Turkish military still regards any form of political Islam as a potential threat. "Islam and democracy hand in hand is never trusted by the military," he says. The debate over political Islam has become even more intense after the discovery of dozens of bodies belonging to the victims of the Islamic group, Turkish Hezbollah, which has shocked the nation. Human remains have been recovered across the country. Abdullah Gul of the Virtue party said: "about 99% of those killed, were our supporters. He denies any involvement of their party in fundamentalist activities. We have a very large potential in this country, very large proportion support us. "

The mayor of Kayseri went on trial on charges of using religion to incite hatred and division, punishable by three years in prison. The mayor, Sukru Karatepe, who's a leading Islamist, made a speech, in which he urged people to fight against Turkey's secular system. Mr. Karatepe says his remarks have been taken out of context, and that he's the victim of a political campaign.

In 26 February, 1998, the students of Istanbul university protested against a ban on beards and Islamic-style headscarves. Turkey's National Security Council -- composed of top military generals and government leaders -- has discussed these protests. In Turkey, the moustache is a distinct part of the personality. Civil servants have been issued with clear directives or instructions about the type, the exact length and shape of the moustache - it has to be clipped straight, and it must end above the upper lip. Such strict secular dress codes, are designed to quell any rise in Islamic sentiment.

In August, 2000 the Turkish army chief called for a purge of all civil servants and government employees with alleged links to Islamist groups on the pretext that they are trying to undermine the secular state. "The army expels this kind of people as soon as it detects them. If [the government] wants public offices to function properly it should do the same," Huseyin Kivrikoglu, chief of the army's general staff, has said. The Turkish military acts as a powerful defender of secularism in Turkey, and has expelled over 200 people since 1996. Those personnel have been dismissed because they are suspected of having links to separatist Kurdish and anti-secular Islamic movements.


The Justice and Development Party:

In August, 2001 moderate members of Turkey's outlawed pro-Islamic Virtue Party have announced the forming of a new party. The Justice and Development Party is led by the popular former mayor of Istanbul, Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdogan and become the most popular political party in Turkey. The new party is known by its Turkish initials AK, meaning white or clean. Mr. Erdogan is topping the polls and looks like he might rise to head a new government as Turkey is heading for early elections in November and the prospects for its mainstream political parties are not good. Popular disaffection runs so deep.

Erdogan's newly formed pro-Islamic party enjoys a 24 percent, making it by far the leader of the political pack. Newsweek reported that: "unless the military steps to stop the AK's meteoric rise, it looks like Turkish voters are ready to give Erdogan and his Islamic alternative a try. In the wake of war on terror and when Islam is widely taken as an enemy of modernity, that prospect might be expected to set the alarm bells jangling especially in Europe and the West!"

Erdogan and many of the AK leadership were once Islamic activists in the Welfare Party. It was Turkey's only experience with an Islamic government. Observers say the new party is expected to offer a serious challenge to mainstream conservative groups at the country's next elections.

Mr. Erdogan himself was banned from politics in 1998 for inciting religious hatred by reciting a poem with pro-Islamic messages. He spent four months in jail in 1999 for "inciting religious extremism," when he read out a poem to a crowd in southeastern Turkey. The poem says: "The domes of the mosques are helmets / And the minarets are our bayonets." He is also currently under investigation again after videos were released last year recording remarks he made in 1992, in which he appears to praise Islamic Sharia and criticize the Army's role in politics.

Recently a court ruled that his 1999 conviction bars him from being elected to Parliament and therefore from becoming a prime minister. He is also facing treason charges for criticizing the Army in 1992, and another criminal investigation has been opened for alleged corruption when he was mayor of Istanbul - an accusation that many find ironic since, at the time Erdogan was famously uncorrupt, to the point of refusing even to live in the official mayor's residence!

In May, 2001, a court in Turkey ordered the police to arrest and take to prison the leader of an Islamic group who was convicted last year of inciting religious hatred. Mehmet Kutlular, the leader of the Nur Cemaati group, was sentenced to two years in prison for claiming in a speech at a religious ceremony that an earthquake was God's revenge against Turkey for its secularist policies. The appeal was rejected by a court and an administrative court ordered the enforcement of the sentence. In another trial, the head of a pro-Islamic industrialists' association, Erol Yarar, faces a possible three-year sentence on the charge of inciting religious hatred.

The Zionist Connection:

The Ottoman Sultans had repeatedly refused to hand over Palestine to the Zionist Movement, until they were defeated in World War I. Nowadays, the Ataturkist Turks are bolstering their bilateral ties with the Zionist Entity. The Israeli Defence Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, visited Turkey in July 2001, to strengthen strategic ties between the two countries.
Ben-Eliezer said he also wanted to promote joint projects between the Israeli and Turkish armed forces. Turkey and Israel have developed close security ties since the signing of a military accord in 1996. The agreement angered many Arab and Muslim countries.

In August 2001, the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited Ankara at a time when there is growing dismay within the Muslim World at the Palestinians' plight. The Israeli-Turkish relationship is an alliance of military heavyweights who both suffer from a sense of regional isolation. This military alliance undoubtedly has important security as well as political and economic aspects. There is a public and a private face of this alliance and it is only possible to speculate on the intelligence sharing and contingency-planning that may be going on behind the scenes.

Both Israel and Turkey are close allies of the United States, but the US is often unwilling to share advanced military technology with Ankara. Turkey is eager to get US approval to buy Israel's Arrow anti-missile system. Israel has upgraded Turkish warplanes, it is negotiating to upgrade Turkey's older US-supplied tanks. This military dimension is only part of a much broader economic relationship linking the two countries. Israel's arms industry, which is seen as essential in maintaining the country's qualitative military edge, has eagerly seized upon the Turkish contracts. Israeli warplanes have conducted training flights in Turkish air space and there have been joint naval exercises.

The Israelis are negotiating with Turkey for the possible sale of fresh water to Israel. The water can be piped on board converted oil tankers moored off-shore. Water is fast becoming a strategic asset in such a dry region and the Turkish water market may trigger fresh conflicts with Syria and Iraq over the waters of Euphrates and Tigris.

Turkey's Failed EU Ambitions:

Turkey may have been campaigning to join the EU for years, but the EU still provokes many of the old Turkish suspicions and betrayal has never gone away. There is a long line of European actions which are profoundly anti-Turkish. Whatever the political and economic route which Turkey have to adopt or conditions fulfilled, it will never be accepted into the EU.

Senior politicians believe there are influential forces in Europe who want to revive the "spirit of Sevres" and see Turkey weakened and divided. They are opposed to Turkey's EU ambitions - the Christian Democrats in Germany, for example, make no secret of their belief that it is inappropriate to admit such a large Muslim nation as a member. It is, many Turks believe, another sign of the "Christian Club" mobilising to keep over sixty million Muslims out of the EU.

A recent Turkish newspaper survey showed that the countries which Turks most distrust are all near neighbors, and, much of the anger has been directed towards Europe.


CREDIT : Peret @ mforum