It's rough going
EuropeMar 20th 1999 edition
AS ELECTION approaches go, Turkey's is proving more than averagely bumpy. A month before voting day, April 18th, a series of bombings has hit Istanbul and other cities. The capture of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), is proving a mixed blessing. And a bunch of angry politicians has been trying to unseat the country's caretaker prime minister, Bulent Ecevit.
In protest against his seizure by Turkish special forces in Kenya on February 16th, Mr Ocalan's guerrillas and other shadowy armed groups of the far left sympathetic to his cause have unleashed a campaign of urban violence that has killed more than 20 civilians. A dozen died on March 13th when unidentified assailants threw a petrol bomb into a crowded store in Istanbul. As the victims were being buried, the PKK announced that the whole of Turkey had become a "war zone"; tourists, it said, should stay away. The group has made such threats before, at the start of the tourist season, but the events of the past week suggest it may be more serious this year.
You might have thought that this rash of violence would have prompted the country's politicians to sink their differences. Not so. Some 120 members of parliament who have been struck off their parties' lists of candidates for the election—most of Turkey's parties are run in a pretty high-handed way—called a special session of parliament in an attempt to postpone the voting. On March 16th, "the disgruntled ones" signed a censure motion against Mr Ecevit's minority government, hoping to bring it down. They got the backing not only of the centre-left Republican People's Party, which is afraid it will not get the 10% of the vote needed to win any seats at all, but, more unexpectedly, of the Virtue Party, Turkey's Islamists, the biggest group in the present 550-member parliament.
It might seem odd for the Islamists to want to delay the election, since opinion polls currently give them more votes than anyone else (22% on the latest reckoning, a bit more than they got in the 1995 election). Their aim was probably to try to get Necmettin Erbakan back into politics.
Mr Erbakan was leader of the Welfare Party, Virtue's predecessor, and Turkey's prime minister until the country's generals prised him out of office two years ago, and then got Welfare banned, on the rather thinly supported charge that he had been trying to overthrow the secular state. The pugnacious Mr Erbakan, with the help of money contributed by Turkish Islamists living in Europe, has remained a force in Turkey's politics—and still has a firm grip over the renamed party. It is pretty obvious that he persuaded the Virtue people to back the disgruntled ones in exchange for a promise that they would try to amend the constitution in ways that would enable him to return to political life.
But even some of Virtue's admirers in the press have begun to express dismay about Mr Erbakan's ambition and the apparent unwillingness of Recai Kutan, Virtue's titular leader, to stand up to it. They think, rightly or wrongly, that all this could cost the party votes.
Which is welcome news for those who want the election to go ahead on schedule. After all, to postpone an election due in a month's time is not technically easy; postponement would require complex legal manoeuvres, which might take weeks. There also appears to be no consensus among those disgruntled types as to who the new prime minister should be. Anyway, even if Mr Ecevit were overthrown, President Suleyman Demirel could use his constitutional powers to order the country to go to the polls. And on March 18th Turkey's top general, Huseyin Kivrikoglu, said that the election should not be delayed.
Meanwhile, the country's hawkish chief prosecutor, Vural Savas, an ally of the generals, is seeking the death penalty for four of Mr Erbakan's friends on charges of trying to establish an Islamic state during Welfare's year in office. Mr Savas has added threateningly that it would be their leader's turn next. It does not exactly add up to a tranquil pre-election discussion.
This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline "It's rough going"
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