28 June - 4 July 2001
Issue No.540
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 June - 4 July 2001 Issue No.540 |
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Virtue's in disgrace
Turkey's official banning of its largest opposition party is another blow to the country's already battered democratic credentials. Gareth Jenkins reports from Ankara
Last Friday, the Turkish Constitutional Court officially outlawed the country's largest opposition party, the Islamist Virtue Party (VP), on the grounds that it was fomenting challenges to the secular state. The court also banned five members of the VP from political activity for a minimum of five years. Under Turkish law, the VP's 102 members of parliament are now classed as independents and the party's assets become the property of the state.
Over the last 10 years, the Turkish courts have banned 17 political parties, almost all for alleged Islamist or Kurdish sympathies. The VP was founded in December 1997 as the Turkish courts prepared to ban the Islamist Welfare Party (WP), which had been forced out in June 1997 under pressure from Turkey's rigorously secular military after 11 months in power. The WP was officially outlawed in January 1998 and its chairman, former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, banned from politics for five years.
Most of the former members of the WP transferred their allegiance to the VP, which was led by Recai Kutan, a former aide to Erbakan. But, wary of provoking another reaction from the Turkish military, Kutan tried to create a more moderate, less explicitly Islamist image for the new party.
Over the last two years, however, the VP has been increasingly divided between traditionalists, who support Erbakan and Kutan, and a younger generation of reformists, headed by Tayyip Erdogan, the charismatic former mayor of Istanbul. Even its most determined opponents freely admitted that, regardless of whether the VP's moderate image was real or mere camouflage, the party was in too much disarray to mount any effective challenge to the secular establishment.
Accordingly, last Friday's ruling by the Constitutional Court appears to have been driven by a desire for revenge rather than political calculation or an objective assessment of the facts. In announcing its decision to close the VP, the court produced no solid evidence that the party had advocated the creation of a state based on religious law, much less tried actively to create one.
Two of the five members of the VP banned from politics are currently members of parliament, and will now be dismissed with no right of appeal. Both were accused of actively encouraging anti-secular activities. Yet, again, no firm evidence was produced. One of the deputies, Bekir Sobaci, appears merely to have offended the judges by making a speech in which he questioned the parentage of the military officers who had spearheaded the campaign to topple the WP-led government in 1997.
The court's claim that the other deputy, Nazli Ilicak, one of the VP's two female members of parliament, had been working actively to create a state based on shari'a has been greeted with a mixture of outrage and ridicule. Ilicak, a 57-year-old journalist, openly smokes, drinks wine, has never covered her head and does not fast during Ramadan. Yet she infuriated the secular establishment by both supporting the right of pious women to wear headscarves and by publishing leaked military documents detailing the general staff's attempts to manipulate the media.
Ilicak remains unrepentant and has already announced that she will apply to the European Court of Human Rights. "I shall continue my struggle for democratic principles and the political ban slapped on me will only be a medal of honour," she declared.
As well as further blackening Turkey's international reputation, the ban on the VP is likely to play into the hands of the party's reformist wing. Sources close to Erdogan admit that he was reluctant to break away from the VP and establish his own party for fear that he would be accused of disloyalty and dividing the Islamist movement. But with the VP banned, Erdogan's supporters are stepping up their efforts and expect to announce the formation of a new party before the end of the summer.
"Initially, we are prepared for Kutan to establish his own party and for some people to go with him," a source close to Erdogan said. "But we are confident that they will return to us. Erdogan is Turkey's future prime minister. Banning Virtue will just enable him to come to power more quickly. The so-called secularist establishment must be stupid not to realise that."
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