Turkey’s troubles. Secular worries

Date: 27/05/06

A spat with a general proves upsetting

"THERE is a price for each word uttered by people in responsible positions," said Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Turkish prime minister was talking about an unprecedented outburst by the chief of the general staff, General Hilmi Ozkok, after last week's shooting in a courtroom in Ankara that killed one pro-secular judge and wounded four others. The general had called the anti-government demonstrations that followed "admirable".

Alparslan Arslan, a 29-year-old lawyer who was the gunman, said he had picked on the judges because they supported the ban on the Islamic headscarf in public offices, schools and universities. Members of the cabinet, including the foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, and the justice minister, Cemil Cicek, were called "murderers" by thousands of pro-secular Turks, who flocked to the city's main mosque for the judge's funeral on May 18th. Mr Erdogan was pilloried for not being there.

A day later President Ahmet Necdet Sezer marched with generals, university rectors and some 20,000 protesters to Ataturk's mausoleum. It was the biggest pro-secular rally since the 1993 murder of a columnist on a secular daily, Cumhuriyet. "Turkey is secular and will remain secular," shouted the marchers. But will it? That has been the worry of millions of Westernised Turks ever since the mild Islamists led by Mr Erdogan, came to power in 2002 with a big majority.

The secularists' fears have been exploited by the army, whose powers are being steadily eroded by a string of reforms made necessary for Turkey to win its prized start of membership talks with the European Union last October. Mr Erdogan's supporters blamed agents of "the deep state" of rogue security officials and bureaucrats for last week's attack. Their aim is said to be to torpedo the EU process, weaken the government and bully Mr Erdogan into ditching his ambitions to succeed Mr Sezer when he retires next year.

Mr Arslan's bizarre web of connections suggest that he did not act alone. His alleged accomplices include a former army captain, who was dumped at an Istanbul hospital with self-inflicted knife wounds after the killing, and sundry ultra-nationalists involved in extra-judicial killings, extortion rackets and attacks against Christians and Kurds. But even if the affair proves to be a conspiracy, Mr Erdogan still needs to ask himself why so many Turks blamed the government.

One reason may be that, just like his pro-secular critics, Mr Erdogan has been decidedly selective in his sense of democracy and justice. He has loudly denounced court rulings against the headscarf. Yet, when an Istanbul prosecutor pressed charges against the country's best-known author, Orhan Pamuk, for speaking about the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottomans in 1915, Mr Erdogan did not utter a squeak of reproach. His claims to defend the interests of all Turks, not just religious ones, are beginning to ring hollow.

Yet those who are baying for the government's blood should think twice as well. For all his shortcomings, Mr Erdogan has brought Turkey greater freedom and stability than any of his pro-secular predecessors. His attempts to increase Islam's visibility in public life have remained just that. Although a recent poll suggests that Mr Erdogan's popularity rating has slipped from 35% to 28%, his party still has twice as much support as the pro-secular Republican People's party. Indeed, the lack of a credible opposition remains one of Turkey's biggest weaknesses.

Should the judge's murder prove to be an individual act of retribution, "the implications are far more worrying than those of a conspiracy," says Murat Erdogan, at Ankara's Hacettepe University. "That could mean there will be further such incidents, whereas conspiracies can be unveiled and brought under control."

Articles discusses the implications and repercussions of the killing of a pro-secular judge in Turkey by a young Islamic lawyer, May 2006.