23 - 29 August 2001
Issue No.548
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 23 - 29 August 2001 Issue No.548 |
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Old dog, new tricks?
A new Islamic party in Turkey is making a bid for the centre ground, by celebrating Atatürk and courting the EU. But Turkey's secularists remain suspicious, Gareth Jenkins reports from Istanbul
The first ever split in Turkey's Islamist movement was formalised last week when young Islamists officially established their own party under the leadership of Tayyip Erdogan, the charismatic 45 year-old former mayor of Istanbul.
The full name of the new party is the Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, (the Justice and Development Party), or the AK Partisi (AKP) for short. In Turkish, 'AK' also means "white" or "clean", emphasising the party's determination to distance itself from the corruption and nepotism that have become endemic in Turkish politics.
Last month, followers of that doyen of the Turkish Islamist movement, former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, formed their own party, known as Saadet, meaning "Contentment" or "Felicity." Erbakan was barred from politics for five years in 1998 and has appointed Recai Kutan, a former aide, as caretaker chairman of the party until his ban expires in 2003. But Erbakan will turn 75 in October. In recent years his traditional grassroots supporters have steadily turned to the younger generation of Islamists.
AKP enjoys better omens than its rival. Saadet has 48 deputies in Turkey's 550-seat unicameral parliament; AKP has 51. But opinion polls suggest that Saadet is likely to win under five percent of the vote in the next general election, while AKP could expect to win 35-40 percent: enough to bring it to power in its own right. Accordingly, Erdogan has become both the hope of Turkey's Islamists (particularly in rural areas and the shanty towns that encircle Turkey's cities), and the bane of the country's secularists, who dread that he will introduce a political system based on Islamic law.
In a rousing 40 minute speech to launch the new party last week, Erdogan deliberately played down any references to religion, choosing instead to emphasise the AKP's commitment to democracy, freedom of expression and open government and its determination to combat corruption and nepotism. To underline the AKP's commitment to "enlightenment", Erdogan revealed the party's emblem, a shining yellow light bulb. But he also promised that the party would not only represent the people but be drawn from the people. "All members of the party will smell of the earth, of knowledge and of Anatolia," Erdogan said.
Erdogan went on to stress the AKP's commitment to Turkey's application for EU membership. "This means that European standards will be introduced to Turkey," he said. "Instead of our young people going to Europe, we shall bring Europe to Turkey."
In a further nod to the secularists, the hall in which the launch ceremony took place was draped with a large poster of Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, whose state ideology is based on a rigid, uncompromising secularism. Not only did the AKP members observe a minute's silence in memory of Atatürk, a day after the launch ceremony on 14 August, party leaders visited his tomb to pay homage. This was the first ever such visit by the leadership of an Islamist party.
The reverence shown to Atatürk has wrong-footed Erdogan's secular opponents. But it has only increased their suspicions that he is hiding his true intentions until a more auspicious time. During the early 1990s, Erdogan frequently declared that the Koran was his only reference and once famously described democracy as a tram which one rode until one reached one's true destination. In 1998, he served four months in prison after publicly reciting a poem which mixed religious and military imagery.
"A leopard doesn't change his spots," said one secularist businessman. "At the moment Erdogan is saying the right things, but we still don't know what he is really thinking."
Erdogan's opponents are unlikely to give him the benefit of the doubt. Earlier this month, Rahmi Koc, Turkey's richest tycoon, went on television to accuse Erdogan of having accumulated over a billion dollars in donations from foreign and Turkish sympathisers. Several secularist newspapers are running campaigns to try and show that far from being a scourge of venality, Erdogan awarded municipal contracts to his political supporters while mayor of Istanbul from 1994-1998. Neither Koc nor the secularist media have yet produced any conclusive evidence to prove their claims. But AKP leaders are aware that a concerted smear campaign will eventually begin to sow doubt in the minds of some of the party's supporters.
"We are doing very well in the polls at the moment," said AKP deputy chairman Abdullah Gul. "But we know that unless new elections are held soon, some of this support might fade."
The importance of the timing of elections has not been lost on Turkey's rigorously secularist military. "Turkey is experiencing the worst economic crisis in the republic's history," said a source close to the military. "Under the current circumstances of course Erdogan will benefit. As a result, we don't think that early general elections would be to the country's benefit," he said.
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