Turkey’s new prime minister. Trouble, trouble, trouble

Date: 15/03/03

Tayyip Erdogan has got the job he deserves - and problems galore

TAYYIP ERDOGAN was at last poised this week to take over the formal running of government. But just as parliament appeared ready to give his administration a new vote of confidence, Turkey was in danger of falling ever deeper into an economic and diplomatic quagmire.

Though he was the undisputed leader of the Justice and Development Party (AK), he had been excluded from its electoral triumph last November - and from standing for parliament - by a constitutional ban, as he had once been convicted of reciting an allegedly Islamist poem at a political meeting. And though AK had won an outright majority of the parliamentary seats, he could not, since he did not hold one of them, become prime minister.

Into the job he put a loyal stand-in, Abdullah Gul. Mr Erdogan's followers voted to amend the constitution, repeated the vote when President Ahmet Necdet Sezer vetoed the change, and won their point. On March 9th in the south-eastern province of Siirt, his wife's home area, he was elected with a resounding 85% of the vote.

Mr Erdogan will have no respite. The big issue facing Turkey is Iraq, and the fall-out, geopolitical and economic, from the Turkish parliament's disagreement with the United States about it. On March 1st, some 100 AK members voted with the opposition against a bill, put forward by Mr Gul and firmly endorsed by Mr Erdogan, to allow the deployment in Turkey of 62,000 American combat troops ready to move into northern Iraq. The parliament had already accepted a much smaller deployment of technicians to upgrade Turkish ports and air bases. But, reflecting public opinion massively opposed to any war, many MPs, including many of Mr Erdogan's disciples, balked at this logical next step: the bill got a small majority but not enough - half of those in the chamber, including abstainers - to make it law.

The Americans, already tired of waiting and fed up with the haggling over the huge price Turkey demanded as compensation for the costs of a war, were appalled. This week Mr Erdogan had a telephone call from George Bush urging him to resubmit the bill to parliament. Mr Erdogan was in a cleft stick: should he defy many of his MPs and still more of the electorate, or enrage Turkey's main ally and essential economic backer?

More followed. The inter-communal talks sponsored by the UN with the aim of reuniting the Greek-Cypriot and Turkish-Cypriot parts of that island collapsed. Mr Erdogan late last year went some way - far further than any previous Turkish government - to arm-twist the Turkish-Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash. But not enough. The Turkish government again failed to make Mr Denktash budge.

The European Union is cross. Its spokesman said that the Greek bit of Cyprus would be admitted as a full member on its own - and that Turkey, with tens of thousands of its troops in Mr Denktash's self-styled republic, would be seen as occupying a piece of EU territory. The message was clear. Turkey, a would-be EU member for some 40 years, risks seeing its own dreams, which have been encouraged by Mr Erdogan, put aside for years more.

Enter the World Bank: the new budget the Turkish government unveiled last week unfairly taxed the poor, it said, and the Bank probably would not release a $1.4 billion tranche of a loan for development projects. Only a day earlier, the IMF had praised the government's austerity measures, saying it would hand out a promised $1.6 billion. A further blow came on March 12th: the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Turkey's trial of Abdullah Ocalan, the separatist Kurdish guerrilla chief, had been unfair, and that he should be retried. Blackmail, cried Bulent Arinc, the AK speaker of parliament.

And the American troops? Despite open support for their deployment from Turkey's army chief, General Hilmi Ozkok, public opposition to it - and to any Turkish involvement in a war against Iraq - has been growing. Television images of troops and equipment being unloaded at Iskenderun, on the Mediterranean, and heading for the south-east, where the Americans have been converting a flour factory into a logistics base, have not helped.

The government at first said the Americans were merely upgrading, as parliament had said they could. No way, said the opposition Republican People's Party: these were combat forces and they were moving weapons and tanks into Turkey. “Illegal occupation”, it shouted. The army said it would launch its own investigation. Mr Erdogan is now said to favour a new bill to let the Americans use Turkish airspace to fly their troops directly into northern Iraq. But would that satisfy them?

It better had. Turkey has huge debts - and the Americans are not minded to fork out the “compensation” they earlier agreed to except for a proper return. And they could be much tougher still. But it would dissatisfy many of Mr Erdogan's supporters. “I hope he does not make up his mind on economic considerations alone,” said one such MP. “Turkey's sovereignty and security are at stake.”