ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday condemned a bid by state prosecutors to shut down his ruling AK Party as an attack on democracy and political stability and vowed to resist it.
By Gareth Jones
ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday condemned a bid by state prosecutors to shut down his ruling AK Party as an attack on democracy and political stability and vowed to resist it.
A state prosecutor asked Turkey's Constitutional Court on Friday to close the AK Party because he said it was trying to destroy secularism and turn the country into an Islamic state.
He also sought to ban Erdogan, President Abdullah Gul and scores of other AK Party officials from politics for five years in a move that drew criticism from the European Union, which Ankara aims to join, and looks sure to rattle financial markets.
!ADVERTISEMENT!Turkey may have to wait many months for the court's verdict.
"This case is a step taken against the national will," Erdogan told a televised AK Party rally in southeast Turkey.
"Nobody can depict the AK Party... as a hotbed of anti-secular activity... Nobody can deflect us from our path. We will continue our democratic march with the same determination."
Erdogan, a pious Muslim who was once briefly jailed and barred from politics for reading a religious poem in public, strongly denies claims that his party has an Islamist agenda.
The EU enlargement chief criticized the indictment move.
"In a normal European democracy, political issues are debated in parliament and decided in the ballot box, not in the court room," Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said in a statement faxed to Reuters in Brussels.
Asked whether the lawsuit could affect Turkey's EU entry bid, he said: "It is difficult to see that this lawsuit respects the democratic principles of a normal European society."
Ankara began EU entry negotiations in 2005 but its bid has slowed sharply amid rows over Cyprus and human rights.
Rehn also urged Turkey's government to respect the independence of the judiciary. "The executive should not meddle in the court's work while the court should not meddle in democratic politics," he told reporters.
FEUD OVER RELIGION
The 162-page indictment, drawn up by the chief prosecutor at the Court of Appeals, marks the latest shot in a long-running feud between Turkey's fiercely secular elite, which includes the judges and army generals, and the religiously minded government.
Political tensions in Turkey have been especially high since parliament -- dominated by the AK Party -- approved constitutional amendments last month easing a ban on women students wearing the Muslim headscarf on university campuses.
Secularists see the headscarf as a symbol of political Islam and the most visible sign of what they regard as the increasing influence of religion in officially secular Turkey.
Erdogan, a popular politician whose wife and daughters cover their heads, says the headscarf is an issue of personal freedom.
The AK Party, born of a coalition of Islamists, centre-right politicians and nationalists, has presided over strong economic growth and liberal political reforms since sweeping to power in 2002. It won a fresh four-year term in last July's elections.
In their indictment, as cited by Turkish media, the prosecutors said: "There is an attempt to expunge the secular principles of the constitution ... The AK Party envisages a model (of society) which takes its reference from religion."
The indictment also accused the government of maintaining ties with previously banned Islamist parties from the 1990s and said AK Party supporters wedded to Islamist ideas were steadily infiltrating state structures.
The Constitutional Court is currently weighing an appeal from the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) to annul the recent headscarf reform as contrary to secularism.
The courts and the military see themselves as guardians of the country's strict separation of religion and politics, rooted in the foundation of the modern state in the 1920s from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
A string of parties suspected of Islamist or Kurdish separatist ambitions have been banned in the past, before reemerging under another name. As recently as 1997, the military edged from power a party it said threatened the secular order.
The AK, however, has garnered a breadth of support far beyond that enjoyed by parties banned in the past and stressed its liberal democratic credentials, appealing to middle classes as well as impoverished workers in the Anatolian heartland.
(Additional reporting by Paul Taylor in Brussels; Editing by Richard Balmforth)
