4 November 2002

1. "Political whitewash in Turkey", Turkey's political establishment has been stunned by the landslide election victory of the moderate Islamic Justice and development Party, the AKP. None of the parties that went into parliament at the last elections have survived. The party of incumbent Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit got only one percent of the vote.

2. 'If it all goes wrong, then there's always the army'", Turks like their army. According to surveys, they have more faith in it than any other institution — certainly more than politics. “If the army ran for election,” said one Western diplomat based here, “there would be a landslide”.

3. "Turkey's Islamic party makes EU entry top priority", Turkey's moderate Islamic party promised to make joining the European Union a priority, as it claimed victory in an election overshadowed by an economic crisis and accusations of political corruption.

4. "DEHAP claims harassed in elections", Norman Paech, part of a German delegation monitoring the election, said he had not witnessed irregularities before the polls during a visit to other areas in the southeast, but the issues raised by DEHAP officials in Sirnak were troubling.

5. "Stop the state terrorism", PKK Council of Leaders member Osman Ocalan stated that they denounced all forms of terrorism and called on Turkey to stop the state terrorism. Ocalan said "Turkey responds to the demands of the Kurdish people for peace, democracy and freedom by violence."

6. "The Turkish question", by Martin Walker.

1. - Radio Netherland - "Political whitewash in Turkey":

4 November 2002

Turkey's political establishment has been stunned by the landslide election victory of the moderate Islamic Justice and development Party, the AKP. None of the parties that went into parliament at the last elections have survived. The party of incumbent Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit got only one percent of the vote.

It was no less than a knockout blow to Turkey's established parties. The newly formed AKP won more than one third of all ballots in Sunday's general elections, giving it an outright majority with more than 360 seats in the 550-member Turkish parliament. The ailing outgoing Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, 77, saw his three-party coalition wiped off the map, dumped from power without a single seat.

Supporters of the AKP party - or AK is its known - were overjoyed with the victory. The leader of the Justice and Development party, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, announced his win as a great day for Turkey.

Widespread discontent

Our correspondent in Turkey Dorian Jones explains that, amid widespread disenchantment with months of political turmoil and economic depression, Turkish voters opted for change. The new party, he says, attracted so much popular support because it pledged to bring a corruption-free government that will sort out the economy and lead Turkey into the European Union. But he adds, in essence, this has been a negative vote.

"Turkey is suffering from its worst economic recession in 50 years. Over the last decade, the country has been ridden with one crisis after another and the last one is the worst. So, people are really suffering all over the country. In fact, it's not an exaggeration to say that a large proportion of the country is literally hungry, with free meals being distributed in most of the cities. So, the people are extremely angry with the established parties along with a series of massive corruption scandals affecting all the main established parties. The voters simply had enough and voted all the established parties out of parliament. None of the parties elected in the previous election are now represented in parliament."

Controversial party

The AKP, however, is dogged by controversy. Its leader, Recep Tayyib Erdogan, is barred from becoming prime minister because of a 1998 conviction for Islamist sedition. The party executive will meet on Tuesday to discuss whom it would put forward for prime minister. In the meantime, it's unclear who will lead the nation.

"Only a week before the election, the leading state prosecutor opened up a case calling for the party's closure. In the prosecutor's view, the party failed to carry out a court decision ordering AK leader Erdogan to step down, due to a previous conviction that saw him sent to jail for four months on sedition charges. With the first full hearing starting in less than two weeks, this case is a major cloud hanging over the party. Mr Erdogan himself is facing two individual cases and could land in jail if found guilty."

Secular state

Developments in Turkey will be closely watched by the EU and the United States, which relies on Turkish airbases for any military strike on Saddam Hussein's Iraq regime. Inside Turkey, it's the army that's keeping a watchful eye over the AKP, the first party with Islamist roots to win a majority in parliament in the 79-year-old Turkish republic. As custodians of the country's secular tradition, the military has unseated four governments since 1960. Our correspondent says the issue of Islamic political influence is still extremely contentious in Turkey.

"There's always been this ongoing tension between people wanting greater Muslim influence. Over the years, there've been various Islamic parties challenging the secular order. In 1997, the first Islamic-led government was forced out of office by the secular military who claimed the government threatened the constitution. The ruling party was subsequently closed down. So, there's a great deal of fear and nervousness towards any party that's linked to religion. It has to be said that the AK party claims they are no longer connected to religion. It has presented itself as a conservative right-wing party. Still, a lot of people are not convinced by that."

2. - The Times - "'If it all goes wrong, then there's always the army'":

4 November 2002 / by Suna Erdem

TURKS like their army. According to surveys, they have more faith in it than any other institution — certainly more than politics. “If the army ran for election,” said one Western diplomat based here, “there would be a landslide”.

The Turkish military is the self-appointed guardian of the 79-year-old secular republic and, in the minds of the electorate, the back-stop for any extreme political movement that might be let in through the democratic process. When the chattering classes say “if it all goes wrong, then there’s always the army”, that is no empty conviction.

Nato’s conscript-fuelled second-largest army staged three coups between 1960 and 1980 — the last, to stop street warfare between the Right and the Left — and used its influence to oust Turkey’s first Islamist-led Government in 1997. It is unlikely to take tanks on to the streets these days, but its psychological effect on politicians is strong.

Taha Akyol, a columnist for Milliyet newspaper and political commentator on television, said: “A lot of politicians I speak to are much less critical (of the army) on camera than they are in our private chats beforehand. They don’t want a clash.”

The military’s power is also enshrined in the Constitution, written after the 1980 coup, which defines the framework for the powerful National Security Council (MGK).

This board of top ministers, the President and Chiefs of Staff meets regularly so that the military can “advise” politicians. It gives generals the right to correspond directly with institutions. There are also military members in bodies such as the higher education board and the media watchdog RTUK.

Although the generals have no right to interfere directly in the legal system, regular pronouncements about the legacy of Kemal Ataturk, the war hero and founder of secular Turkey, weigh heavily on judges. That said, the army has changed tack. Where it used to make political pronouncements, it is now more subtle in its ways.

It has been noticeable by its absence in the debate surrounding the former Islamists in this election. People in close contact with the army’s top brass say that they have no strong objection to a government involving their Justice and Development Party — at least not for now.

Can Dunbar, a political commentator, said: “Of course they showed (when they pushed the Islamists out before) that they can stop a process if they want.

“But they have seen that banning parties and hanging leaders just makes these movements stronger. They have seen it does not work.”

3. - The Guardian - "Turkey's Islamic party makes EU entry top priority":

ANKARA / 4 November 2002 / by Owen Bowcott

Turkey's moderate Islamic party promised to make joining the European Union a priority, as it claimed victory in an election overshadowed by an economic crisis and accusations of political corruption.

In a statement designed to reassure Ankara's nervous establishment, Yasar Yakis, the vice-chairman of the Justice and Development party (AKP), promised to accelerate preparations to meet the criteria for EU membership ahead of a crucial European summit in Copenhagen next month.

The AKP - formed last year mainly by deputies from previously banned Islamist groups - led the opinion polls throughout the campaign but is under legal threat of closure. Its leader, the former Istanbul mayor Reccep Tayyip Erdogan, is disqualified from standing for the national assembly after having read a poem deemed to incite religious hatred.

Despite describing itself as "conservative democrat" and denying that its political credo is dominated by an Islamist agenda, the AKP's advance is seen by some as a threat to Turkey's secular state.

Mr Yakis, a former Turkish ambassador to the United Nations, stressed the party's desire to look west. "Our first priority in government will be to complete the framework document for the Copenhagen criteria," he told the Guardian. "We don't want to leave any pretext for Europe to say that Turkey will not be admitted."

He agreed that closure of the party, currently being pursued by the state's chief prosecutor, would generate a constitutional crisis but said that was "a very remote possibility".

The more immediate problem is who the AKP would choose to become prime minister. Mr Erdogan cannot take the post. Turkey has no by-elections so there is no means of his entering the assembly if the disqualification were lifted.

"We will meet shortly and discuss who will be our candidate for prime minister," Mr Yakis said yesterday. "I don't think the president will nominate a different person [if the AKP has a majority]. If he does, there will be a political crisis and the president will be responsible for this."

The scale of the AKP victory meant that the party will have no need to form a coalition government.

The centre-left Republican People's Party (CHP), which will now form the main oppo sition, is the party most committed to secularism and there is little affinity between the leaders of the two parties. Professor Yakup Kepenek, a member of the CHP's central committee, reaffirmed his party's commitment to preserving the secular nature of the Turkish state.

"We are the most secular party. That's our raison d'être," he said. "Throughout the campaign we had people coming to us worried about the AKP and Islam. The life of the secu lar state is threatened." He added: "You should not exploit the religious feelings of the people. If the AKP is closed down by the courts that will produce a real clash between politics and the law."

Only one party made opposition to the EU a major policy in its electoral platform. The Nationalist Action party launched its campaign convinced that voters did not want to cede political powers to Brussels - particularly if it meant allowing Kurdish separatist groups to organise more openly.

Yesterday's warm weather across most of Turkey boosted expectations of a high turnout. More than 41 million Turks were entitled to vote.

The names and symbols of 18 parties were side by side on each ballot paper, making them almost two feet wide. There are 550 seats in the national assembly but only parties that obtain more than 10% of the national vote can have deputies elected.

Turkey may plunge into constitutional crisis after polls

Turkey edged towards constitutional crisis on Friday as its highest court ruled that it may yet outlaw the moderate Islamic party which has led the opinion polls in the run-up to general election.

A final decision on whether to close down the Justice and Development party (AKP) will not be taken for at least several weeks, leaving millions of voters uncertain whether their ballots may later be in effect declared invalid by the slow-moving legal process.

The other day the constitutional court in Ankara said it would, in a fortnight's time, re-examine the case for closing the AKP.

The chief prosecutor, Sabih Kanadoglu, claims the party breaches regulations governing how political parties are run. The AKP has been asked to submit a defence. Previously, Islamic parties have been banned on the basis of their constitutions.

Even before the AKP had launched its first general election campaign, the public prosecutor had moved against the party leader, Reccep Tayyip Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul. In September, the Supreme Court ruled that he could not stand as a candidate because he had been imprisoned briefly in 1999 for "incitement to religious hatred".

That punishment was imposed after he recited, at a public meeting, an old poem which compared minarets to bayonets, the domes of mosques to helmets, and the Muslim faithful to soldiers. The crime for which he was sentenced no longer exists but because he was jailed under a specific article of the penal code, the judge maintained he could never hold public office.

Erdogan accepts that the party he founded has its roots in Islamic concerns about social welfare, but insists it is no more religiously obsessed than any Christian Democrat party in western Europe.

He condemned the court rulings as a "heavy blow to Turkish democracy".

His reformulated version of political Islam is none the less sending tremors through the capital's establishment. The party is way ahead of rivals in the opinion polls - which give it up to 30 per cent of the vote - and, unless banned, is likely to form the next government.

The latest legal manoeuvre has added to suspicions that the army is increasingly anxious about the outcome of the vote. The armed forces interpret their constitutional role as safeguarding the secular state established by Kemal Ataturk in the 1920s.

Behind the government and the national assembly - a nest of corrupt politicians, according to many Turks - power resides with the military-dominated National Security Council, which consists of four senior ministers, the chief of the general staff and commanders of the army, navy, air force and police.

Five years ago, the military forced an Islamist-led government to step down. The generals feared religious changes to schools would undermine society; it was a bloodless coup, and the tanks never left the barracks. Successive Islamist parties were banned, only to re-emerge under different names.

The last few days of campaigning have been dominated by the question of who will become the next prime minister.

Erdogan is disqualified because he cannot be an MP. He says his party board will select a new leader, possibly Abdullah Gul, an economics professor and deputy party chairman. On Thursday, however, the president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, intervened by announcing he would designate the next prime minister after the elections.

Erdogan has been desperately downplaying his Islamic roots while courting voters disenchanted with the outgoing ruling coalition.

Green is the traditional colour of Islam, the colour adopted by Islamist parties across the Middle East. But the only splash of green outside the AKP's election headquarters is a lawn dotted with gurgling fountains.

"Everything is for Turkey", announces one slogan; "Constant brightnessess", promises another.

The party's flags are pastel blue, yellow and white. In Turkish, the party's main initials, AK, spell a two-letter word which can mean white, clean or unblemished. No mention of green.

"AKP will be an honest government," Erdogan told one interviewer. "Poverty will be overcome. You can have a secular government, it doesn't conflict with Islam; Islam is a religion."

Asked whether the army might remove his party from power, he replied: "What do you mean? They are my army, how would I not work with them?"

If the AKP wins office it is likely to proceed with caution. Inside party headquarters, a marble and smoked-glass office block lent by a sympathetic businessman, officials deny they will pursue an Islamist programme.

The vexed question of women's headscarves - which cannot be worn in public buildings or universities under Turkey's rigid secular laws - will not be top of the agenda, one woman insists.

The AKP is firmly in favour of joining the EU. It also supports the close military alliance with the US, and welcomes America's attempts to persuade Brussels to give Turkey a date for EU entry. Any eventual decision to ban the AKP is likely to damage Turkey's hopes of being given a definite date.

4. - Reuters - "DEHAP claims harassed in elections":

Norman Paech, part of a German delegation monitoring the election, said he had not witnessed irregularities before the polls during a visit to other areas in the southeast, but the issues raised by DEHAP officials in Sirnak were troubling.

SIRNAK / 4 November 2002

Kurdish politicians in a Turkish province accused authorities of harassing supporters in rural areas as Sunday's general election got underway.

The emergency administration in the region, set up to combat armed Kurdish separatism, said there were no problems.

"The process of voting is going on in a peaceful manner. Everyone can vote in the way they want to," Gokhan Aydiner, head of the emergency administration in Diyarbakir said.

International observers and human rights groups are in Turkey to monitor the election, that comes as the EU candidate country presses the bloc to announce a date to start entry talks at a summit in Copenhagen next month.

Officials from the Democratic People's Party (DEHAP), the sole pro-Kurdish party contesting the polls, told Reuters security officers were intimidating villagers in the southeastern Sirnak province, bordering Iraq, against voting for the party.

"The intimidation ranges from threats to promises of running water and electricity in areas that don't vote for DEHAP," said parliamentary candidate Tahil Elci.

Turkey has welcomed independent election monitors as well as officials from the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to ensure fair elections.

The United States is also closely following the polls in its NATO ally which it could call upon for support in the event of a military strike against Iraq.

Open voting

"Everyone here wants DEHAP to win but the pressure is great and the fear is great," said a shopkeeper in the small town of Beytussebap, who gave his name only as Mehmet.

Jonathan Sugden of New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said residents had told him local government officials in some of the region's towns and villages said they would be holding "open voting" at polling stations to ensure voters did not cast ballots for DEHAP.

Open voting implies voting being carried out without the privacy of a cubicle or votes being presented in dozens by the head of a clan or group. A DEHAP official in Beytussebap, Kamil Acar, said he was aware of such instances.

Sugden spoke of an "empire of fear" in parts of Sirnak province, including Beytussebap.

Sirnak, an impoverished mountain province, was the scene of clashes between the army and Kurdish terrorists, a conflict that has killed more than 30,000 people since 1984.

DEHAP enjoys wide support in the predominantly Kurdish southeast but is struggling to overcome a 10 percent national vote threshold which parties must clear to enter parliament.

The party's predecessor HADEP dropped out of the election in September fearing it would be outlawed before the polls on charges it maintains ties with PKK terrorists who have waged an armed campaign for an ethnic homeland in southeast Turkey.

DEHAP remains suspect in the eyes of the powerful military and the political establishment.

"We face a number of obstacles that other parties don't encounter," said DEHAP candidate Mehmet Yamuk. "The law is applied differently here in Sirnak."

Norman Paech, part of a German delegation monitoring the election, said he had not witnessed irregularities before the polls during a visit to other areas in the southeast, but the issues raised by DEHAP officials in Sirnak were troubling.

"We are hearing reports of pressure and intimidation and this is of concern at a time when Turkey is working to enter the European Union," Paech said.

5. - Kurdish Observer - "Stop the state terrorism":

PKK Council of Leaders member Osman Ocalan stated that they denounced all forms of terrorism and called on Turkey to stop the state terrorism. Ocalan said "Turkey responds to the demands of the Kurdish people for peace, democracy and freedom by violence."

MHA / FRANKFURT / 1 November 2002

PKK Council of Leaders member Osman Ocalan drew attention to the claims that PKK should also be included to the list of terrorist organisations prepared by European Union (EU), calling on the Turkish state to give up the efforts to accuse the democratic freedom movement of Kurds of being a terrorist organisation. The Kurdish leader said the following: "We as a party and the Kurdish people condemn all sorts of terrorism. We condemn the state terrorism and terrorism by organisations and individuals. We condemn all kinds of violence which target civilian people, increase chaos, cause instability and do not produce any solution whatever their justifications are. Our stance is clear-cut. And we want everybody understand it."

Stressing that problems could only be solved through peace and political dialogue in the framework of democratic union, Ocalan had to say the following: "We call on Turkey to change its stance, and on international forces to use their influence to force Turkey to stop the repression on the Kurdish people." Ocalan reminded that Turkey accused European Union of not accusing the Kurdish movement of being a terrorist organisation, saying "But what Turkey should do is to give up the policies it has been carrying out since its establishment and make a self-criticism."

Since the beginning of its establishment

The Kurdish leader, emphasizing that the Turkish state had denied the Kurdish people since its establishment and had implemented all sorts of oppression, continued as follows: "It is an undeniable fact that hundreds of thousands of Kurdish people have been massacred. And there have been also arrests, torture and forced migrations. What they did during the last uprising, that is the struggle led by PKK are evident. They burnt more than 4 thousand villages and fields, the inhabitants were forced to migrate under the most difficult conditions. Their number amounts to millions. Likewise hundreds of thousands people were tortured and arrested. Summary executions turned into almost a massacre, and thousands of our intellectuals, writers, villagers, workers were killed. The number of killings perpetrated by unknown murderers are also high. There also also hundreds of disappeareds, their fate are not known."

Detentions in Van

Osman Ocalan also touched on the subject of detention of students in Van, saying the following: "Hundreds of students were detained only because they submitted petitions demanding education in Kurdish. Petitions are not considered a crime in democratic regimes. But the state detained the students violating its own laws. Turkey responds to the demands of the Kurdish people for peace, democracy and freedom by violence."

Call to EU

Ocalan considered the resistance of the European Union against the impositions of the Turkish state a positive development, and continued with words to the effect: "We thank them. But EU should go further on. We say them that they should warn Turkey. It should say clearly that in case of the repression on the Kurdish people continue, Turkey will be included to the list of terrorist states. And it should not be influenced by the Kurdish state. We know that PKK members and sympathizers are subjected to legal investigations in European countries, they are arrested, they are prosecuted. We think that they are done under the negative influence of Turkey. Turkey's impositions forces even European democratic laws. Europe should understand it clearly and put an end to the arrests, prosecutions of and repression on the PKK members and Kurdish people."

6. - UPI - "The Turkish question":

WASHINGTON / 3 November 2002 / By Martin Walker

Shortly before German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer flew to Washington this week to begin repairing the ugly breach in relations with the Bush administration, the prestigious Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper published a front-page exclusive story.

It claimed that in a letter to the German government, the White House had listed three American conditions to heal the rift. Berlin should back the Bush administration's policy on Iraq; make its airspace and bases available; and use Berlin's best efforts to speed Turkey's accession into the European Union.

The story was officially denied; there was no letter, and the White House knows better than to ask for direct military support on Iraq when Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder had won re-election in September by vowing never to join such an American "adventure." That, along with a few gratuitous comments from other German politicians comparing President George Bush to Adolf Hitler and the Roman Emperor Augustus, was what caused the row in the first place.

But the story contained a very large nugget of fact. There have been constant consultations between Washington and Berlin as the diplomats try to get relations between these two old allies back to normal, including Germany's offer to take over the Afghan peacekeeping force from Jan. 1. And the United States has made it clear that it would very much like the Schroeder government to help the Turks, by persuading the rest of the EU to agree on a conditional date for the start of Turkey's accession negotiations.

Three interesting events took place Tuesday. In a phone call to Turkey's President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, mainly covering Iraq, Bush made a point of stressing his support for Turkey's bid to join the EU. The same day, Turkey's foreign minister was in Berlin, being assured by Fischer that Germany "would do its utmost" to support Turkey's EU membership. And Schroeder told Denmark's Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, current president of the EU Council, that Germany favored Turkey getting a date at the December summit, where Rasmussen will be host.

This is not the first time White House pressure for Turkey, justifiably seen in Washington as a loyal and a valued NATO ally in a strategic location that needs to be locked into stable Western institutions, has been exerted on the Europeans. During the Cardiff summit of 1998, President Bill Clinton woke up the Greek prime minister with a phone call urging him to lift a veto on Turkish negotiations. During the EU's Helsinki summit in December of 1999, Clinton cajoled them into formally accepting Turkey as a candidate for membership -- the first crucial step of what can be a very, very long process. (Turkey first applied to join back in 1965.)

Now that it has candidate status, in theory nothing can stop Turkey's eventual membership, so long as it meets the Copenhagen criteria (requirements on human rights and democracy) and completes the accession procedure. This means overhauling the Turkish state bureaucracy to meet the requirements of the acquis communautaire, the EU's 80,000-page administrative rulebook.

In fact, the bureaucrats of Brussels can spin this out for a very long time. They will be tempted to so, because Turkey is mainly Islamic, and its birthrate will probably make it the most populous country in the EU by 2010. It could thus claim the largest share of seats in the EU parliament, while being the poorest country. This will impose strains on the EU budget, and fundamentally change the character of what has hitherto been a white, prosperous and Christian club.

Moreover, once Turkey joins, the EU would suddenly find itself sharing borders with Iran, Iraq and Syria, this becoming intimately involved in the tangled affairs of the Middle East-Persian Gulf region. The EU's nervousness at the implications of Turkish membership is understandable, but looks like being doomed.

The EU's first line of defense, the Copenhagen criteria, is crumbling fast. Turkey has put a moratorium on the death penalty, banned torture, overhauled its judicial regime, and appears genuinely to be making a strong effort to install democratic institutions. The moderate Islamic AK (Justice and development) party looks likely to win Sunday's Turkish election, and this time the ever-watchful army is showing no signs of its traditional anti-Islamist intervention to stop it taking office. If the soldiers stay in their barracks, that would count strongly toward establishing Turkey's democratic credentials.

The EU's second line of defense, the traditional Greek-Turkish hostility, is also crumbling, thanks to the far-sighted Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou, who has emerged as Turkey's staunchest champion in Europe.

The third line of defense, German nervousness at bringing in a country that already provides the bulk of Germany's immigrants, is visibly bending under American pressure, and Schroeder is finding that pressure much harder to resist as he tries to restore relations with the White House after those offensive remarks during his re-election campaign. And with the United States needing Turkish backing for its planned assault on Iraq, that American pressure is not going to subside anytime soon.