TURKISH BID TO BAN PARTY POSES EU RISK, SOLANA SAYS
By James G. Neuger
Bloomberg
April 8 2008
April 8 (Bloomberg) — Moves by Turkish prosecutors to ban Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s political party pose a "grave" risk
to Turkey’s bid to join the European Union, the bloc’s foreign-policy
chief, Javier Solana, said.
Turkey’s Constitutional Court last week agreed to hear a lawsuit
that would outlaw Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, turning
the courtroom into the scene of a power struggle that threatens to
destabilize Turkey.
"I hope the supreme court is sensible in its ruling because it would
be a hard blow for Turkey and a blow for Turkey’s relations with us
in Europe," Solana told the European Parliament’s foreign-affairs
committee in Brussels today. "The consequences could be very grave."
Turkey has inched toward the EU since starting entry talks in 2005.
It has begun talks in six of the bloc’s 35 policy areas and completed
one. The EU blocked talks in eight areas to protest Turkey’s trade
embargo against the Greek-speaking Republic of Cyprus, an EU member.
Chief Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya filed the lawsuit on March 14,
arguing that Erdogan’s Islamic-leaning party is trying to hollow out
Turkey’s traditional separation of mosque and state.
`Nothing Good’
Turkey "would be in a very serious constitutional position were the
party to be outlawed," Solana said. Speaking to reporters after the
hearing, he said the impact on Turkey’s EU bid would be "nothing good,
really — I don’t want to be more specific."
The case has echoes of a constitutional challenge by the army last
year to an Erdogan-backed candidate for president that led to early
elections. Erdogan went on to win a second term with 47 percent of
the vote, the largest parliamentary majority in 40 years.
Stressing that the EU endorsed those elections as free and fair,
Solana said it would be a violation of European norms for a court to
overturn a legitimate result reached at the ballot box.
A court-ordered ouster of a democratically elected leader is "not
something very normal," Solana said. "It would be rather unusual."
Headscarves
The trigger for the court case was a decision by the parliament in
February to allow university students to don Islamic-style headscarves,
seen by defenders of Turkey’s secular traditions as an intrusion of
religion into the classroom.
While Islamist parties were shuttered in 1998 and 2001, constitutional
amendments since then make it harder for Turkish courts to close down
political parties.
Erdogan is counting on his popularity to ride out the legal
confrontation. Economic growth averaging 7 percent has won him broad
support among the middle classes and insulated Justice from critics
of its Islamist roots.
Erdogan today criticized his detractors for pursuing the "politics
of crisis," saying in Ankara that the party’s policies reflect the
wishes of all of Turkey’s 71 million people.
EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn, in charge of the entry talks,
said the confrontation with prosecutors shouldn’t get in the way of
Erdogan’s plans to overhaul Turkish society along western lines.
"It is apparent that the government now focuses on the reforms,
the legislative and political reforms, and will not let this case
disturb its focus on enhancing the rights and living standards of
Turkish citizens," Rehn told reporters at a Hanns Seidel Foundation
conference today.
Foreign Investment
Erdogan huddled with his top economic ministers today to discuss how
to prevent the tussle with prosecutors from rattling the business
community and putting foreign investment at risk.
Seeking to put its EU bid back on track amid the furor over the court
case, the government yesterday said it will amend a law that has been
used to prosecute authors for criticizing Turkish national traditions.
Article 301 of the penal code makes it a crime to "insult" the Turkish
national identity. The law has been used in attempts to muzzle hundreds
of writers and intellectuals, including Nobel Prize-winning novelist
Orhan Pamuk.
In the most notorious case to date, a journalist convicted under the
law, Hrant Dink, was later murdered by a teenage nationalist. Dink’s
crime was to challenge official denials that the World War I massacre
of Armenians by Ottoman Turks amounted to "genocide."