Turkey on the brink

Date: 11/07/02

By Dick Leonard

Turkey's hopes for EU membership will be seriously undermined if ailing Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit refuses to give up the reins of power following this week's dramatic ministerial resignations in Ankara.

AS HE struggles desperately to remain in power, in the face of a split in his Democratic Left Party (DSP) and the resignation of six cabinet ministers, the ailing 77-year-old Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit is preparing for delicate talks with Romano Prodi, who arrives in Ankara on 18 July.

Put bluntly, the Turks believe they have already done enough to satisfy the Copenhagen criteria for EU membership, and that a date to start negotiations should now be set.

The Commission, while recognising the serious efforts which have been made, thinks that much more still needs to be done. One reason for the difference in perception is that the Turks take a much more legalistic view of the progress they have made in meeting the EU's requirements.

Two major packages of constitutional reform have been pushed through the Turkish parliament in fairly unpropitious circumstances, something which the Commission recognises as a remarkable achievement.

The problem is that in all too many cases the changes made have been on paper only and that implementation has fallen far short of what had been promised. The Commission president is expected, in particular, to press upon the Turkish authorities the importance of making serious progress between now and the Copenhagen summit in December on abolition of the death penalty and the freedom to use Kurdish and other non-Turkish languages in education and broadcasting.

Until Turks are guaranteed freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of religion and other basic rights - in practice as well as theory - Turkey will not get a date for the opening of membership talks, he will say.

It would be a pity if that were all that Prodi said. He should also spell out - not only in private talks but also in public declarations - why the EU needs and wants Turkey as a member.

Many Turks are convinced that the EU doesn't really want them, and will always find excuses for keeping them out.

The Commission president is perhaps better placed than any other EU leader to dispel this view.

He has a warm and long-standing attachment to Turkey, where he chose to spend his honeymoon.

He knows how much Europe would stand to gain from welcoming this vibrant country, with its young and dynamic labour force, enormous potential market and strategic position at the cross-roads between Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and which, as a modern Islamic country, would demonstrate that the EU is not just a Christian club but a community based on universal values.

Turkey's present difficulties stem directly from Ecevit's illness. Reports that he is dying may be exaggerated, but it is clear that he is very sick indeed, with a multitude of ailments, and that both his mobility and his attention span are severely limited by the effects of the cortisone treatment he receives.

Previously, he had shown great skill in governing Turkey, and in keeping together his unwieldy coalition with the far-right National Action Party (MHP) of Devlet Bahceli and the centrist Motherland Party (ANAP) of deputy premier Mesut Yilmaz.

But his illness has opened up a disastrous vacuum - with urgent decisions just not being taken.

The country was slowly emerging from a severe recession, with negative growth of 7.4% last year, and still heavily dependent on IMF funding.

Yet its progress has again been set back over recent weeks by heavy falls on the stock exchange and in the value of the Turkish lira, which are attributed to uncertainty over Ecevit's future.

Moreover the United Nations-sponsored talks on Cyprus have effectively ground to a halt, after more than 40 meetings between Greek Cypriot leader Glafcos Clerides and the Turkish Cypriot Rauf Denktas, at least partly because there is nobody in Ankara who has the authority to apply pressure to Denktas to agree a deal. Ecevit has declared that he would carry on until the next election, due in 2004, and until this week few people were prepared to challenge his decision, as it was felt that only he could keep the present coalition together.

Nor was there much appetite to precipitate an earlier election, as all of the coalition parties are deeply unpopular due to the recession, and none of them could currently command the 10% necessary under Turkey's peculiar electoral law, to obtain any representation in Parliament.

In fact, only one party, the opposition Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, would currently meet this threshold with 18% in the latest opinion poll and Erdogan is facing legal action to ban his party because of its Islamist ties.

Legal opinion differs as to whether the present Parliament has the power to amend the law and enable the threshold to be abolished in an early poll.

Nevertheless, an election may now be inevitable, and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer is being pressed to call an emergency meeting of Parliament on 1 August to prepare the way for polls on 29 September.

The latest word out of Ankara yesterday (10 July), however, is that Bahceli, who precipitated the present crisis last week by calling for an early election, may now be getting cold feet and is preparing a deal with Ecevit to keep him at least nominally in power, heading a reconstructed coalition dominated by the MHP, which is now the largest party.

Ecevit's formidable wife, Rahsan, would probably take over the leadership of the rump DSP in the hope of eventually succeeding him.

Meanwhile, Husamettin Ozkan, formerly Ecevit's right-hand man who led the resigning ministers out of the government last week, is planning to form a new party, to which he hopes to attract Foreign Minister Ismail Cem.

The objective would be to eject the HMP from government and form a new and more cohesive coalition by bringing in the opposition True Path Party (DYP) of former premier Tansu Ciller.

The problem is that Ciller is at daggers' drawn with the deputy premier Yilmaz, whose presence in the government would be essential.

If, despite this, a 'marriage of convenience' could be arranged, it would perhaps open the way to the choice of a non-party figure, in the form of the highly respected Economics Minister Kemal Dervis, to take over as prime minister.

This would provide the best hope both of restoring the Turkish economy and of clearing the path to EU membership.

It might not work out this way, and in any case there will be unpredictable risks if Ecevit does decide to stand down.

They will be graver still if he insists on clinging on while he is so severely incapacitated.

Major feature analysing Turkey's hopes of joining the European Union.