ANKARA, 5 August 2007 — Turkey’s new Parliament met yesterday for an oath-taking ceremony for the first time since Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted party won a landslide victory in elections last month.
The opening of the legislature set the stage for a tension-loaded parliamentary vote later this month to elect the country’s next president, a row over which triggered a political crisis in April and forced the early legislative polls held July 22.
The spotlight was also on 21 militant Kurdish politicians who won seats for the first time since the early 1990s when the first parliamentary stint of Kurds campaigning for minority rights ended in disaster.
The oldest member, 83-year-old Sukru Elekdag of the opposition People’s Republican Party, presided over the opening session pending the election of a new speaker.
Calling on the 550 lawmakers to “act with the good sense and sagacity of statesmen, without yielding to emotion, in a spirit of conciliation and dialogue,” he invited them to swear, individually and in alphabetical order, fidelity to “the secular and democratic Turkish republic.” The oath-taking session was to continue until around midnight (2100 GMT).
The deputies of the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP) had earlier pledged not to provoke the storm unleashed at the memorable swearing-in ceremony of 1991 by Leyla Zana, the first Kurdish woman to enter Parliament.
“Starting from the oath-taking ceremony, our attitudes in Parliament will be in line with the law... we will seek solutions to the problems on legitimate grounds,” one of them, Aysel Tugluk, wrote in a recent newspaper article. Some DTP deputies went so far yesterday as to shake the hands of members of the Nationalist Action Party, which backs a merciless war against Kurdish separatists.
Zana had said she took the oath under duress and added a message of peace in Kurdish, breaking a taboo of speaking the language in public. She defiantly wore a headband in the colors of the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), whose bloody campaign for Kurdish self-rule is still going on.
In 1994, Parliament lifted the immunity of Zana and her Kurdish colleagues on charges of aiding the PKK, which Ankara lists as a terrorist organization.
Some of them, including Zana, were jailed for a decade; others went into exile or joined the PKK. Since then Turkey, under EU pressure, has lifted emergency rule in the Kurdish-majority southeast and legalized broadcasts and private language courses in Kurdish.
Despite their peaceful rhetoric, the DTP members remain under suspicion of being a PKK tool, fueled by their refusal to condemn the group as terrorist.
Army commanders, who traditionally make a short appearance at the ceremony, were not expected to attend yesterday, officially because of a high-level military meeting.
Media reports, however, said the generals were reluctant to witness the inauguration of recalcitrant Kurdish members of Parliament.
Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer would not attend either, as he did after the 2002 elections.
Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) won 341 seats in Parliament in last month’s polls, followed by the Republican People’s Party with 99 seats, the Nationalist Action Party with 70, the DTP with 20 and the Democratic Left Party with 13.
The remaining MPs are independents, among them a Kurdish activist who is likely to join the DTP later.
Erdogan was forced to bring elections forward from November after the AKP failed to install Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul as president when an opposition boycott blocked two parliamentary votes in April and May.
The crisis worsened with a threatening statement from the army and mass street protests against the prospect of a president from the AKP, which secularists accuse of seeking to erode the separation of state and religion.
The party, which has disowned its Islamist roots, denies the charges. Gul has signaled he remains a candidate for president, saying that the AKP’s election victory reflects popular support for his bid.
A referendum on constitutional reforms initiated by the AKP in the wake of the turmoil over Gul’s candidacy, including electing the president by universal suffrage instead of by parliament, will take place on Oct. 21.
