ANKARA, 10 September 2005 — Turkish police arrested 38 supporters of a pan-Islamist party attempting to demonstrate at a mosque where Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was performing Friday prayers, the state-run Anatolian news agency said.
Police quickly surrounded the group of Hizbut-Tahrir supporters at the Haci Bayram Mosque in Ankara who shouted slogans and tried to distribute leaflets in favor of Islamic rule in this mainly Muslim but strictly secular country, Anatolia said. Erdogan was inside the mosque at the time.
The local prosecutor’s office ordered five of the detained to be released and the rest to be questioned by anti-terror police, the agency added.
Hizbut-Tahrir, or the Party of Islamic Liberation, is a Sunni movement founded in the Middle East in the 1950s and aims to establish a world-wide Islamic state. It is outlawed in Turkey and was classified as a “terrorist” organization by Russia’s Supreme Court in February 2003.
Germany has banned the group for anti-Semitism; British Prime Minister Tony Blair said last month that his country too would ban the party as part of a security crackdown following the July 7 bombings in London. The group remains legal, however, in most Western countries.
Yesterday’s police intervention came one week after a similar demonstration by Hizbut-Tahrir members at a mosque in Istanbul. Riot police were on hand then but did not intervene and were severely criticized by the media and most political leaders, including Erdogan.
The protesters carried placards reading “Either the caliphate or martyrdom,” referring to the party’s aim of choosing a caliph to implement Islamic law. Despite its secular roots, Turkey has never managed to erase Islamic parties completely from its political landscape.
A number of Islamic parties have been banned, including two that spawned Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party. Erdogan himself spent four months in jail before becoming prime minister for reading an Islamic nationalist poem.
Erdogan said the media helped Hizbut-Tahrir’s cause. “The thing they want is to create publicity,” Radikal newspaper yesterday quoted him as saying in an interview. “Whenever they are given space by the big media groups, it is propaganda for them.” Uzbekistan blamed the London-based Hizbut-Tahrir for violence in its eastern city of Andizhan in May when troops fired on protesters and killed at least 160 people.
