Turkish political Islam fights for survival in court

By Vincent Boland

Published: July 27 2008 19:55 | Last updated: July 27 2008 19:55

Turkey is used to upheaval. From financial collapses to military coups to earthquakes, the country seems to endure more than its share of crises. But it has never before been faced with the scenario that will unfold on Monday, when the 11 judges of the constitutional court begin deliberating on the most politically explosive case in the 46-year history of what is the country’s highest legal body.

Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, the chief prosecutor, has asked the judges to declare that the Justice and Development party (AKP), the populist, religiously rooted, socially conservative political movement that has governed Turkey for nearly six years, is “a centre of anti-secular activity” that is undermining the constitution and must be closed down. He also wants the judges to ban President Abdullah Gul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, and 69 other party officials from party activity for five years.

The case has riveted the public and virtually paralysed the government since it was filed in March. Until it has been decided – perhaps this week and at the latest by the middle of August – Turkey will be awash with rumour, speculation and misinformation. Tolga Ediz, an economist at Lehman Brothers, calls the closure threat a “seismic event” for Turkey. Ibrahim Kalin, director of the Seta think-tank in Ankara, says the case confronts the judges with a “historic responsibility”.

Its outcome will shape the immediate future of Turkey, including its quest to join the European Union and its faltering economic reform programme. It will also determine the nature and duration of the continuing war between Turkey’s secular powers – the military-judicial-bureaucratic-business-academic-media elite centred on Istanbul and Ankara – and the AKP’s huge but disparate power base, which includes a large part of the Kurdish ethnic vote, conservative rural voters and, above all, a flourishing middle class in the cities of Anatolia that is emerging as a threat to the power and privileges of the secular elite.

This battle between the secularists and the conservatives has been going on for decades but it is reaching a critical point. The AKP case is being determined just as Turkey’s internal stability appears to be under threat again after several years of relative calm. Prosecutors in Istanbul claim to have unearthed a “plot” by a group of militant Turkish nationalists – including retired armed forces personnel, university rectors and newspaper columnists – to overthrow the government. The scenario allegedly involves the group, known as Ergenekon, seeking to foment mass unrest through bomb attacks and assassinations of prominent figures, in order to provoke the military – which has staged three coups d’état since 1960 – to oust the government and restore order.
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In addition, the PKK Kurdish separatist group remains a threat despite the Turkish army’s invasion of northern Iraq to attack its bases in January. An attack on the US consulate in Istanbul this month, in which three policemen and three gunmen were killed, is still being investigated but is a reminder that the terrorist threat to Turkey takes many forms. Whether all these incidents are linked – and whether especially there is a connection between the party closure case and the Ergenekon investigation, as some opponents of the AKP are claiming – remains to be seen.

The case puts a rare and intense spotlight on the constitutional court, which was created by the military after the 1960 coup to ensure that the religious and social conservatism that is such a feature of Turkish society did not undermine the strictly secular foundations of the state. Turkey was established on the principle that Islam was to be subordinate to the state; today, a state-controlled directorate of religious affairs dictates what imams can preach and has tight control over the mosques.

Many Turks think the AKP threatens that arrangement. The party was created in 2001 by Mr Erdogan, Mr Gul and others as an ostensibly centrist version of two overtly Islamist predecessor parties. Since coming to power the following year it has revived the economy and taken charge of Turkey’s ambition to join the EU. In return, Europe, the US and much of the Muslim world – as well as a growing number of foreign investors – have a stake in its survival, for differing reasons.

Opponents of the AKP say its supporters, including those abroad, ignore its alleged stealth agenda to Islamise Turkey. There can be little doubt that in many parts of non-metropolitan Turkey religious values shape social behaviour. Whether this has been fuelled by the AKP is a matter for debate. The party, which won nearly 47 per cent of the vote in last year’s general election, also controls nearly every big city government. Important state appointments are going to AKP loyalists.

Most controversially, this year the party pushed a law through parliament to allow girls to wear the headscarf at university. The law was later struck down by the constitutional court.

The question is whether this behaviour represents a threat to secular Turkey. As Hikmet Sami Turk, a government minister in the 1990s and a constitutional scholar, says: “The AKP’s legitimacy and the size of its democratic mandate are not the criteria the court must decide on, because they are not legal points. What the court must decide is whether the AKP is a threat to secularism, and that is open to discussion.”

Mr Yalcinkaya has prepared a 178-page indictment and book of evidence arguing that the actions and statements of senior AKP figures have turned the party into a threat to secularism. Many Turks agree with him, even if some of them stop short of supporting a judicial ban. Mr Erdogan’s supporters say the indictment is flimsy and politically motivated, seeking to achieve through the judiciary a curbing of the AKP’s power that neither the political opposition nor the military have been able to accomplish.

Ihsan Dagi, professor of international relations at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, argues that to portray the AKP as an Islamist threat to Turkey is to misunderstand it. In an essay in the July issue of the Journal of Democracy, he writes that “looking at the AKP’s platform, its public discourse, its social base, and above all its record in government, one does not see an Islamist faction, but rather a globalist, market-oriented, pro-western, and populist political party”.

But Onur Oymen, a senior member of the opposition Republican People’s party, says that just because the AKP has a 47 per cent mandate from voters “there is no rule that says a party with such a percentage of the vote is exempt from the constitution or the rules of the game”.

The AKP’s predecessor parties, notably Welfare and Virtue, were closed in the past decade without much agitation inside Turkey or protest from abroad. This was because they had little support and their leadership little credibility. The AKP is a different beast. A verdict to close it and to banish Mr Erdogan to the political wilderness will have costs.

First, the party has enormous support and strong legitimacy at home and abroad. Second, in government it has introduced a sea-change in foreign policy, compromising over Cyprus and playing a mediating role in the Middle East. Third, it has shown a certain amount of economic competence. There is nothing Turks dread more than a financial catastrophe on the scale of the 2001 crisis, which brought devaluation, bank failures and a recession. Fourth, the EU accession process will be jeopardised. Finally, there is no alternative stable government to an AKP one. If the party and its leadership are ousted, they are well placed to be returned at a snap general election after re*inventing themselves in another guise – and with their mandate enhanced. A ban could thus be counterproductive.

“This case will have either a positive outcome [no closure or bans] or it will have a very negative outcome,” Mr Ediz says. “There is a consensus that it will lead to closure and to muddling through, but I don’t buy that.” He says the burden of proof required to shut down a party is very high and that the indictment does not necessarily provide that.

The AKP has also patched up relations with the military after a clash last year. This has involved allowing the generals free rein to fight the PKK, while the party makes inroads into the Kurdish nationalist vote in the south-east. The general staff has been notably silent on the closure controversy.

Mr Ediz says the judges will be well aware of these factors in reaching their verdict. “They don’t operate in a vacuum,” he says. Mr Kalin says: “I think the judges will have to take these external factors into account, because this case is so unusual.”

Yet a verdict to dismiss the case seems unlikely. Turkey’s judicial establishment is united not just by ties of republican, constitutional and secular ideology but by comradeship. It is inconceivable that the judges would embarrass Mr Yalcinkaya by telling him he has no case. A verdict to ban the AKP and the leadership is the worst-case scenario. It is also the most likely outcome.

But the judges – at least seven of whom must find in favour of closure for that decision to be valid – have one other choice. They can leave the party intact but deny it state funding, which would severely cramp its style in any general election. The accusation of “anti-secular activity” could also tarnish the AKP’s reputation with its more lukewarm supporters, costing it votes in any future election.

Banning the AKP and Mr Erdogan, many commentators and diplomats say, would do nothing to address the issues that underlie Turkey’s constitutional and institutional crisis. Leaving the party and its leadership in place, on the other hand, would make the AKP a permanent feature of political and social life. Mr Kalin says: “The question is whether the secular establishment will be willing to accept that verdict.”

Entry to the Brussels club remains a distant dream

Even before the chief Turkish prosecutor began his campaign to shut down the ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), Turkey’s bid to enter the European Union was in deep trouble.

Turkey’s membership negotiations started in October 2005. But they were thrown into disarray one year later when the EU froze talks in eight of the 35 “chapters”, or policy areas, that must be concluded before a country can join.

The reason was Turkey’s refusal to open its ports and airports to traffic from Cyprus, which entered the EU in 2004. Cyprus is represented in Brussels by the southern, Greek Cypriot part of the divided island rather than the Turkish Cypriot north, where 30,000 troops from Turkey are stationed.

Last week’s announcement that Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders are to open talks in September on reuniting the island should in principle give a boost to Turkey’s EU aspirations. In practice, it is unlikely to turn out that way. Certain EU member states, such as Austria and France, have made it plain that they do not want Turkey to join the EU under any circumstances.

“I remain firmly opposed to the integration of Turkey into the EU,” a high-level official in the Elysée palace told reporters in Paris on July 1, when France took over the EU’s six-month rotating presidency.

The obstacles increased less than two weeks later when Elmar Brok, an influential German lawmaker, piloted a report through the European parliament that foresees an EU-Turkish bond falling short of full Turkish membership.

Turkish entry into the EU appals some legislators because, with more than 70m people, it would have more members of the parliament than any country except Germany.

Public opinion has turned against Turkey. Polls for the European Commission show that, in the EU as a whole, opposition to Turkey’s membership bid has steadily risen over the past 10 years and has exceeded 50 per cent since 2005. According to EU diplomats, if Turkey’s constitutional court were to shut down the AKP, the membership negotiations would not be abandoned but could be informally suspended.

Supporters of Turkey, such as Olli Rehn, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, are anxious to avoid steps that would penalise the political and business forces in Turkey that still have the EU in their sights. As for Turkey’s critics in the EU, there would be little need to turn the screw further.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
FT.com / Comment & analysis / Analysis - Turkish political Islam fights for survival in court
It appears that Turkey values its secularism very seriously and the Army is the custodian over the same.

It is serious that they want to declare the ruling AKP as an anti secular party and ban the President of the country and 69 others from politics for five years!!

This is most extraordinary, more so, when the party was voted into power with a resounding victory! That means the people want the restrictions and back to soft Islam!

One wonders what will be the outcome of this case.