ANALYSIS:THE LATEST development in the battle between Turkish secularists and Islamists was best summed up by Mumtaz Soysal, a former foreign minister who prides himself on his closeness to the Turkish generals who have carried out four coups since 1960, writes Lara Marlowe
"In the old days, the military did the coups; now the judiciary do it for them," Soysal said shortly after Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, Turkey's chief prosecutor, filed a lawsuit against the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AK Party, in March.
If, as expected, the Constitutional Court outlaws the neo-Islamist party, which won the last presidential election and two general elections, 71 of its leaders, including prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and president Abdullah Gul, will be excluded from politics for five years. The party's assets will be confiscated.
Turkey has banned 24 political parties since 1960. Most of these were leftist or Kurdish groups, but since 1971, they've included four Islamist parties, three of which Erdogan belonged to. Each time, supporters of the banned Islamist parties founded a new party and won a greater share of the vote in subsequent elections. After Refah (Welfare) was banned in January 1998, it split into the more radical Fazilet (Virtue), which was also banned, and the more moderate AK Party which has ruled Turkey for the past six years.
In February, AK pushed through a law reversing the ban on women wearing headscarves in university. For AK, it was a question of human rights; in the eyes of their opponents in the military and judiciary, it violated Turkey's sacrosanct secularism.
The lifting of the headscarf ban is the main grievance in prosecutor Yalcinkaya's 162-page indictment of the party and its leaders for being "the centre of activities contrary to the principle of secularism".
The forced departure of Erdogan would be comparable to the US Supreme Court removing George Bush because of his affiliation with evangelical Christians, or the French Conseil Constitutionnel removing Nicolas Sarkozy because he has compromised French state secularism. Until the mid-1990s, Yalcinkaya's indictment notes, Erdogan described himself as "a servant of sharia". The prosecutor rehashes the Islamist past of AK leaders, but bases his indictment mainly on the allegation that AK "aspires, in the long term, to a system founded on sharia rather than the rule of law".
Offered as evidence against AK are attempts to restrict public drinking of alcohol to certain areas, and appointments to public positions seemingly based on religious affiliation. The Istanbul City Council's censorship of bikini ads, and an AK official's statement that "asking a pious girl to remove her headscarf is akin to telling an uncovered one to remove her underpants" are also cited as proof that AK wants to turn Turkey into a theocracy.
It might all seem ludicrous, but it happened before, in almost exactly the same manner. In May 1997, Turkish judges sought the dissolution of the Refah Party, which then shared power in a coalition government. In January 1998, the Constitutional Court dissolved Refah on the grounds it had become "a centre of activities against the principle of secularism" - exactly the charge now levelled against AK.
The leaders of Refah appealed to the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that their right to freedom of association (Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights), freedom of opinion and expression (Article 10), the protection of property (Article 1) and the right to free elections (Article 3) had been violated.
In the landmark case of Refah Partisi, the European Court found in favour of Turkish secularists against the party, on the grounds that:
Then prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan, had spoken of establishing a plurality of legal systems based on differences in religious belief.
Though they made no moves to change Turkey's legal system once they came to office, Refah leaders had spoken of instituting sharia.
Refah leaders had also evoked the possibility of using force to come to power or to retain power.
The European Court agreed with the Turkish Constitutional Court that Erbakan's idea of plural legal systems - which he never tried to put into practice - would result in religious discrimination.
Erbakan's proposal was intriguingly similar to the Archbishop of Canterbury's remarks in February, in which he said that sharia might be applied in certain circumstances in Britain.
The case against Refah, like the current case against the AK Party, was based solely on individual quotations, never on official party policy. Refah was banned - and AK is likely to be banned - for slips of the tongue which secularists claim reveal the party's true intentions. The Turkish Constitutional Court has invented preventive dissolution. Three of seven European judges in the Refah case dissented.
"The acts or statements complained of were not linked in terms of time or place," the dissenting judges wrote, "but were isolated events occurring in very different contexts over a period covering some six years and in certain cases long before Refah came to power."
At a 2006 conference on the implementation of case law of the European Court of Human Rights, Ireland's Director of Public Prosecutions, James Hamilton, expressed unease with the European Court's ruling. "In Refah, the court was prepared to countenance the suppression of a party even though it appeared to have majority support," the DPP said. "One is faced with the paradox of destroying democracy in order to defend it, a position which in the longer term can hardly be sustainable."
José Manuel Barroso, the president of the EU Commission, and Olli Rehn, the EU commissioner for enlargement, have condemned the suit against AK as undemocratic and warned it could block negotiations.
Opponents of Turkish EU accession will be delighted. Washington used to cite AK's success as proof that democracy was possible in Muslim countries. But in recent policy speeches on Turkey, the US secretary of state and the undersecretary of state for political affairs studiously avoided condemning the Constitutional Court's meddling in domestic politics.
The reason, Turkish analysts say, is Erdogan's refusal to follow Washington's lead on neighbouring Iran. The Turkish premier won't cancel natural gas contracts or adopt economic sanctions against Tehran. The Pentagon is again threatening the Islamic Republic, and Erdogan wants no part of it.
Turkish sources claim there's an understanding between Washington and the Turkish generals: Washington will not oppose the court action, in exchange for deniable Turkish support for US action against Iran.
Lara Marlowe is Paris Correspondent. Last autumn, she spent a month in Turkey for a series of lengthy articles exploring the country's politics and culture which were published in October and November.