Turkish prosecutor tries to ban Virtue Party `vampires'

Turkey's Chief Prosecutor, Mr Vural Savas, yesterday launched an attempt in the country's constitutional court to ban the Islamist Virtue Party on the grounds that it was seeking to replace the secular constitution with Islamic law.

Mr Savas described Virtue as a "vampire attacking democracy".

"Like vampires which feed only on blood, they exploit the religious sentiment of some of our citizens in full knowledge they could provoke a conflict with our secular state order." Istanbul stocks rose over two per cent on news of the move.

The secularist government's distaste for Virtue was sharpened last week when the party's newly-elected deputy, Ms Merve Kavakci, wore a head-scarf at the inaugural session of the assembly, the first time this has happened in the 75-year history of the modern Turkish state.

This is particularly inflammatory because the wearing of the scarf is such a powerful symbol of traditional Islamic society, as shown by the continuing controversy over the ban on scarves in French schools. The head-scarf, the badge of female Islamists, is banned in government offices and public institutions.

In response to her gesture, the mainstream Turkish media castigated her for making a call for "jihad", Islamic "holy war, in Chicago in 1997 and for opposing Ankara's plans for joining the European Union. The Virtue Party, the third largest in the Turkish parliament, won more than 100 seats in Turkey's 550 seat assembly in last month's general election. Its banning would disenfranchise more than 15 per cent of the electorate.

On Thursday, the deputy head of Virtue, Mr Aydin Menderes, resigned from the party because he claimed it was determined to destroy itself by confronting the ruling militantly secular politico-military establishment. Mr Menderes, a paraplegic, is the son of Turkey's first democratically elected prime minister, Mr Adnan Menderes, who was hanged in 1961 after the country's first military coup.

The Virtue leader, Mr Recai Kutan, adopted a non-committal attitude to wards this key resignation, saying, "This is his personal choice. Everybody has a right to make assessments freely." However, it is reported that the former head of Virtue's banned predecessor, the Welfare Party, Mr Necmettin Erbakan, engineered the coup by militants, like Ms Kavakci, over the moderates who founded the grouping last year. By encouraging her to don the head-scarf, Mr Erbakan challenged the foundation and the nature of the state created by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk three quarters of a century ago. This is why the chief prosecutor is attempting to ban Virtue.

He has been encouraged by the fact that the Islamist share of the vote dropped from nearly 21 per cent in the 1995 election, making it the largest party in the assembly, to nearly 16 per cent, placing it third in the current house.

Ms Kavakci's head-scarf has sharpened the civilisational struggle waged between secularists and Islamists ever since the Turkish state emerged from the Ottoman Caliphate early this century.

In the view of Prof John Esposito, a leading US expert on Islamic affairs, on one side stand civilian and military "secular fundamentalists" determined to remain true to Ataturk's principles, on the other Islamic activists seeking representation in their country's political structures. Prof Esposito told a conference on religion and politics in Cyprus last week that "secular fundamentalists" have refused to recognise that Islamists are no longer "revolutionaries or terrorists".

In the late 1990s, he said, they evolved into "mainstream movements advocating social uplift and honest government". Unfortunately, he said, the Islamists have not made their ultimate intentions clear, leaving the "secular fundamentalists", staunchly backed by the West in their suppression of political pluralism, arguing that the Islamists want to replace the modern Turkish state with an Islamic state.