Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 21 - 27 September 2000 Issue No. 500
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Time for Erbakan

By Gareth Jenkins

Last Wednesday, as the public prosecutor in Ankara announced a four-month postponement of former Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan's one-year prison sentence, a gendarme snatch squad scoured his summer house near the Aegean coast. Yet, Erbakan himself was over 300 kilometres away, beginning the second week of a holiday at one of Istanbul's most luxurious hotels and surrounded by journalists.

In March this year, Erbakan was sentenced to 12 months in prison under Article 312 of the Turkish Criminal Code for allegedly inciting religious hatred in a speech he had made during a local election campaign in the southeastern city of Bingol in February 1994. In July, the sentence was upheld by the Appeals Court. With time off for good behaviour, Erbakan can expect to serve less than five months in jail. He was originally due to start his sentence on 13 September. The announcement of a four-month postponement means he will now go to prison on 13 January 2001.

Article 312 forbids the expression of any opinions which could incite hatred on the grounds of religion or ethnicity, but is so vague that almost any reference to religion or nationality can be construed as an offence. Originally it was used to imprison Kurdish nationalists. But since the beginning of the military-led crackdown on political Islam that began with the toppling of Erbakan's 11-month-old coalition in summer 1997, it has increasingly been applied to Islamists. In addition to the conviction of 74-year-old Erbakan, the doyen of the Turkish Islamist movement, Article 312 has also been used to imprison the leader of the younger generation of Islamists, former Istanbul mayor Tayyip Erdogan.

Although Turkey's Islamists made little effort to amend Article 312 while it was being used to imprison Kurds, they have been at the forefront of the campaign to have it abolished since it has been used against their own leaders. "All of the anti-democratic laws must be abolished, starting with Article 312," declared Veysel Candan, the vice chairman of the Islamist Virtue Party (VP). "There is no other way."

Many members of the government also accept that Article 312 has to be amended if Turkey is ever to realise its long-cherished dream of joining the EU. "In its current form, Article 312 constitutes an obstacle to freedom of thought and expression. Turkey cannot progress along the road to Europe without amending Article 312," said Deputy Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz, leader of the Motherland Party (MP), the junior partner in the ruling tripartite coalition.

But the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (NAP), the second largest in the coalition, remains adamantly opposed to any changes. "Turkey has got this far and will continue to move forward," said NAP Chairman Devlet Bahceli. "Article 312 is the guarantee of national unity. It cannot be changed."

Last week's bungled attempt to arrest Erbakan has again raised questions about both the efficiency and the impartiality of the Turkish judicial system. In its anxiety to arrest Erbakan, the Public Prosecutor's Office in Ankara apparently instructed the local authorities in Edremit to seize him from his summer house without either waiting for the deadline by which his lawyers could apply for a postponement of the sentence or even checking that Erbakan was there. Even after the application for a postponement of the sentence had been accepted, it took the Public Prosecutor's Office five hours to notify the authorities in Edremit; by which time the gendarme, which is responsible for policing in rural areas, had already spent 45 minutes searching Erbakan's holiday villa.

"It was just standard procedure," declared Justice Minister Sami Turk. "There is no question of the law differentiating between citizens."

But few are convinced. "Are we really expected to believe that the same would have happened if it had just been an ordinary citizen?" asked columnist Tuncay Ozkan in the daily Radikal.

But while the postponement of Erbakan's imprisonment has bought the Islamists more time to lobby for the abolition of Article 312, last week's farce has also demonstrated that the secular establishment has no intention of relaxing its campaign against political Islam. In October, the Constitutional Court is expected to rule on a case brought by the Chief Public Prosecutor calling for the closure of the VP. Even VP officials now admit they will be surprised if the party is not banned.

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