Turkey's chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, is asking his country's Constitutional Court to ban the ruling AK Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan because, by lifting a ban on female students wearing head scarves at university, the party is guilty of anti-secular activities proscribed in Turkey's constitution.
This is a dangerous and ill-considered move, which has taken by surprise even opposition politicians. What effectively Yalcinkaya is asking the country's highest court to do is overturn the democratically expressed will of almost half of the Turkish electorate which only last July re-elected the Erdogan government with an increased majority. Were the court to accept the chief prosecutor's petition and rule in his favor, Turkey would be diverted on to a dark and slippery path.
Yalcinkaya's intervention is the more unexpected because the Constitutional Court is already considering an appeal by the main opposition, the Republican People's Party, over the head scarf issue. We wonder why the chief prosecutor has not awaited the decision in that case. There are many who will suspect the hand of Turkey's powerful military establishment behind Yalcinkaya's action. The armed forces see themselves as the guardians of Kemal Ataturk's political legacy and have three times intervened when the country's querulous politics have allegedly threatened chaos or the constitution was deemed to be threatened. The first coup, which overthrew the maverick Adnan Menderes in 1960, resulted in the premier's execution for violating the constitution.
Article 4 of the present constitution, drawn up during the last military coup in 1980, states that in the first three Articles that Turkey is a republic, that it is democratic, secular and social and that its territory is indivisible and its language Turkish. It is under the secular provision of Article 1 that Yalcinkaya is seeking to have the AK party government thrown out of politics. This aim in itself may, however, be in contravention of the "democratic" provision of the same initial article. What the chief prosecutor is effectively doing is taking on the Turkish electorate. Nor is this his first attempted political intervention. Last November he asked the Constitutional Court to ban the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party as tension rose along the Turkish-Iraq border following increased Kurdish separatist PKK terror attacks. He has to recognize that he is propelling his country toward dissension, which only 30 years ago brought it to the brink of civil war.
The Erdogan government won an increased mandate last year because it had proven itself a moderate and competent administration. It has avoided most of the corruption, scandal and infighting that have stained the record of its predecessors since - and including - the radical reforming government of Turgut Özal Turkey has prospered under the AK Party's leadership. Were the party to be banned, it is hard to imagine the political instability that would follow.
