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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 June 2000 Issue No. 485 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 8 - 14 June 2000 Issue No. 485
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons New cracks in Turkish coalition
By Gareth JenkinsTurkey's increasingly fragile tripartite coalition government received another blow last Friday when the National Movement Party (MHP) members of a parliamentary committee voted to send Mesut Yilmaz, leader of their coalition partner, the Motherland Party (ANAP), to the Supreme Court to face charges of corruption.
The committee had been formed to investigate charges of graft related to Yilmaz's decision in 1998, when he was prime minister, to donate state-owned land to the US auto giant Ford for the construction of a car plant outside the Mediterranean port of Izmir. The committee's decision has to be approved by parliament before charges can be formally made. But it has nevertheless triggered a furious response from Yilmaz.
"Coalitions are based on confidence," he said. "If you don't have confidence in your partner then don't stay in the coalition."
Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, of the Democratic Left Party (DSP), whose representatives on the committee voted to exonerate Yilmaz, has tried to play down the crisis by insisting that the full plenary session of parliament will overturn the committee's decision. "The committee is one thing; the full assembly something else," he said. "Turkey will suffer the consequences if mutual trust is undermined."
But many in the MHP were unrepentant. "The MHP members of the coalition listened to their consciences," declared Health Minister Osman Durmus of the MHP. "Nobody has the right to try to put pressure on them."
Over the last 10 years Yilmaz has faced numerous allegations of tolerating corruption amongst his inner circle of family and friends. In November 1998 he was forced to resign after serving 15 months as prime minister when newspapers published transcripts of telephone conversations between ANAP deputies and members of the Turkish underworld. Eight parliamentary committees have been established to investigate different corruption allegations against Yilmaz. Five have exonerated him, while two have yet to announce a decision.
Ironically, last Friday's decision related to the least controversial of all the charges. There is no evidence that Yilmaz or his inner circle personally benefited from the donation of the land to Ford, which was also undersigned by Ecevit, then the deputy prime minister. Even Suleyman Demirel, who was president at the time, supported Yilmaz's decision, declaring; "I would give away the garden at the Presidential Palace if it would bring foreign capital into the country."
But even if parliament overturns the committee's decision, there is little doubt that mutual trust within the coalition, which had already been severely strained by Ecevit's unsuccessful attempts earlier this year to force through the re-election of Demirel, has sunk to the lowest level since the government was formed after the April 1999 elections. There is already speculation in Ankara that the MHP may be trying to deliver on its pre-election pledge to clean up Turkey's notoriously corrupt political system with an eye on the possibility of fresh polls.
Later this month, the Constitutional Court is due to deliver a verdict on the case for the closure of the Islamist Virtue Party (FP). If the FP is closed, most of its 93 members of the 550-seat parliament will be dismissed. Under Turkish law, by-elections will then have to be held for all of the empty seats. If the coalition partners begin to compete for votes, the tensions within the government could reach breaking point.
In December 1999, as Turkey basked in its new-found status as an official candidate for EU membership, few expected the court to rule against the FP, and government officials optimistically predicted that the country would soon ease its often draconian restrictions on freedom of expression.
But six months later, little appears to have changed. Last Thursday Ahmet Turan Demir, the chairman of the pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party (HADEP), was sentenced to one year in prison. He was convicted of inciting separatism in a speech in October 1999 in which he had equated Turkey with Czechoslovakia; a comparison which the Turkish State Security Court ruled implicitly advocated the division of Turkey similar to the creation of Slovakia and the Czech Republic from a previous unitary state.
On Friday the Court of Appeal began hearing former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan's appeal against a one-year prison sentence for allegedly challenging the principle of secularism as enshrined in the Turkish constitution and referring to secular members of parliament as "infidels." The sentence is unlikely to be overturned.
