State news agency says Turkey's ruling party won parliamentary majority

From the Associated Press

11:55 AM PDT, July 22, 2007

ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey's Islamic-rooted ruling party won parliamentary elections today, taking at least 331 of 550 seats despite warnings from the secular opposition that the government was a threat to secular traditions.

The state-run Anatolia news agency said the ruling Justice and Development Party had won with 85 percent of the votes counted. Two secular parties, the Republican People's Party and the Nationalist Action Party, won 124 seats and 76 seats respectively, Anatolia said. Independents won 19 seats.

Ruling party supporters gathered in front of their Istanbul branch office, clapping, dancing and waving flags depicting the party symbol, a light bulb. In Ankara, the capital, a jubilant crowd of several hundred whooped as they watched election results on a big television screen erected outside party headquarters.

One of parliament's first jobs will be to elect a president. The post is largely ceremonial, but the incumbent has the power to veto legislative bills and government appointments.

In May, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul abandoned his presidential bid after opponents said Gul's election would remove the last obstacle to an Islamic takeover of government, and the military -- instigator of past coups -- threatened to intervene to safeguard secularism.

Ruling Party in Turkey Wins Broad Victory

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

ISTANBUL, July 22 — The ruling party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a broad victory in national parliamentary elections on Sunday, taking nearly half of the total vote in what became a referendum on the future of Turkish democracy.

Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development party took 47 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results, far more than the 34 percent the party received in the last election in 2002. The election result was a slap at the secular state establishment, which had predicted that voters would punish the party for trying to push an Islamic agenda.

But only a fifth of Turks seem to share that concern, with the Republican People’s Party, the main party of Turkey’s secular establishment, receiving 20 percent of the vote, up by 1 percentage point from the last election. The Nationalist Action Party, which that played on fears of ethnic Kurdish separatism, won 14 percent of the vote, election officials said.

Turkey is a NATO member and a strong American ally in a troubled region and its stability is crucial. Its current political soul-searching attempts to find answers to the questions that many Americans have been asking since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: Can an Islamic-oriented government that is popularly elected be democratic and Westward-looking?

It was unclear on Sunday night how Turkey’s powerful and secular military might react, if at all. It issued a sharp warning to Mr. Erdogan’s party in April, saying it had strayed too far from secularism. It has deposed elected governments four times since the Turkish state was founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923 and seemed to be threatening a fifth.

“I believe our democracy will emerge much stronger with this election,” said Mr. Erdogan, voting with his wife Emine in Istanbul, the Anatolian News Agency of Turkey reported. “This isn’t just a message to our country, but a message to the world.”

The struggle in Turkey is essentially one of power. Mr. Erdogan’s party, known in Turkish by its initials, A.K., derives its base in part from a religious, merchant class in rural Turkey. It has pushed hard to gain membership for Turkey in the European Union, rewriting laws to meet European standards and meeting requirements in an International Monetary Fund economic program. It has strengthened economic ties with Israel, and has broached the topic of Turkey’s long-festering problems with its Kurdish minority.

Still, secular, urban Turks are suspicious. The worldview of much of the senior leadership of Mr. Erdogan’s party differs substantially from their own. They recall Mr. Erdogan’s beginnings as an Islamist and say it is impossible to trust his party no matter what their current record is.

“The community that made Tayyip Erdogan who he is is the Islamic community,” said Nu Guvenmez, a gas industry employee who had cast his vote for the secular party in Istanbul. “He hasn’t broken ties. He can’t leave it.”

But some of that concern stems from a deep-rooted class divide. In an affluent neighborhood in Istanbul, members the A.K. party leadership, many of whose wives wear headscarves, were compared unfavorably to administrations in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan — countries with much less vibrant democracies than Turkey — because those wives were uncovered.

The election comes after three months of political uncertainty that followed a showdown over the nation’s presidency, leading to Sunday’s elections ahead of schedule.

Turkey’s secular state elite, backed by its military, used a legal maneuver in May to block Mr. Erdogan’s candidate from becoming president. Their objection was that the wife of the candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, wears a Muslim headscarf.

The episode brought out strong emotions in Turks and deeply divided the nation.

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.

Alliances Shift as Turks Weigh a Political Turn

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

ISTANBUL, July 19 — For 84 years, modern Turkey has been defined by a holy trinity — the army, the republic and its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Each was linked inextricably to the others and all were beyond reproach.

But a deep transformation is under way in this nation of 73 million, and elections this Sunday may prove a watershed: liberal Turks, once supporters of the ruling secular elite and its main backer, the military, are turning their backs on them and pledging votes to religious politicians as well as a new array of independents.

They say that the rigid rules of the last century, which prohibit women from wearing Muslim head scarves in public buildings and forbid ethnic minorities to express their identities, need to be left behind.

“This election is a power struggle between those who want change and those who don’t,” said Zafer Uskul, a prominent constitutional lawyer and human rights advocate who is a candidate from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic-inspired party. “Religion is just an excuse.”

He and others say the rules served a purpose when Turkey was forging a national identity out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire. But now Turkey has outgrown them.

“In 50 years, people will write that this was the time Turkey started to come to terms with its own people,” said Suat Kiniklioglu, a foreign policy expert who is one of about 20 liberal Turks who recently joined Mr. Erdogan’s party as part of its effort to appeal more broadly to secular Turkish society.

The real threat to Turkish democracy, he and others argue, comes not from Islamic fundamentalism, as the military and the secular parties it backs contend, but from political meddling by the military. Commanders have deposed elected governments four times in Turkey’s history, and in April the military challenged the government in a written statement, precipitating elections.

Now, as the elections approach, pitting the nation’s secular elite against a group of religious politicians who draw their support from the lower and middle classes, educated liberals may just tip the balance.

The current shift has its roots in the dual nature of Turkish democracy. From its beginnings in the 1940s, a powerful chain of bureaucrats, judges and army generals from the secular upper classes has controlled the most important Turkish affairs, while the elected government, currently the Justice and Development Party of Mr. Erdogan, manages more mundane aspects, much like a municipality.

But Turkish society has significantly changed in recent decades, with religious Turks gaining wealth and status and moving into public view. Women in head scarves — precisely those whom early Turkish legislation singled out — are in shopping malls, on motor scooters and behind the wheels of cars, and rules against them seem woefully outdated.

Ilhan Dogus, a member of the Young Civilians, an association of young people who oppose the military’s role in politics, said mischievously that educated women in head scarves were more likely than their less religious counterparts to know that Marx refers to a German philosopher, not the British department store, Marks and Spencer.

“This narrow shirt of secularism has become a little too tight and choking for Turkish society,” said Volkan Aytar of the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation, a prominent policy research group.

He is referring to Kemalism, the fiercely secular ideology that sought to extinguish religious networks and ultimately religion itself from society.

The state elite “wanted society to fit their theory,” said Recep Senturk, a research fellow at the Center for Islamic Studies in Istanbul. “If religion doesn’t disappear, we’ll make it disappear because our theory says so.”

Liberals like Mr. Uskul are pioneers in joining political forces with Mr. Erdogan’s party, known by its Turkish initials, AK, and considered by many secular Turks to be too Islamic.

In Tarsus, an upper-middle-class town in southern Turkey that has supported secular parties, Mr. Uskul, 63, was talking to lawyers last week, asking for their votes.

“Some of you might be asking, ‘What is he doing in the AK Party?’ ” he said at the Tarsus Bar Association, peering earnestly through rimless glasses. “There was no other party to do what I wanted to do in Parliament. The people who should be defending democracy are holding onto military coups.”

A woman in a black T-shirt shot back: “I wonder whether you still have worries about AK as a threat to secularism?”

He replied: “My wife has no concerns. Nor does my daughter, and you shouldn’t either.”

The portion of Turkish society hanging onto the old order is shrinking, Mr. Aytar asserts, so when more than a million Turks gathered this spring to protest what they said was creeping Islamism, bizarre combinations were on display. People wore masks of Ataturk, who died more than 60 years ago. The music that played was from 1930s. “They have calcified,” said Baskin Oran, an opinionated professor running as an independent candidate in Istanbul.

Mr. Oran estimates that parties representing that order will get about a quarter of the vote, largely thanks to a campaign of fear that plays on secularism. An ad last week in Cumhuriyet, a staunchly pro-state daily, showed a black ballot box and a woman’s eyes behind the rectangular cut-out, evoking a facial veil. “Are you aware of the danger?” it said. Before the ill-fated presidential election this spring, a television ad flashed the years 1881 and 2007 on a black screen — the year of Ataturk’s birth and the year his secular reforms died.

The campaign was a final straw for some Turkish liberals, who say that it distracts from Turkey’s real problems: unemployment, insufficient social security benefits, poor relations with Kurds and Armenians and the efforts to gain membership in the European Union.

A troubling offshoot is nationalists, who play on fears by warning that the European Union wants to tear Turkey apart. The main nationalist party appears set to win enough votes to make it into the Parliament, supported by Turks who are overwhelmed by the sharp changes in the country over the past five years.

When a liberal newspaper asked for a response to the ads, Ferhat Tumer, a 32-year-old advertising designer, and his colleagues at the ad agency Cocuklar began to brainstorm.

The result was a one-minute cartoon in the style of a late-night American television ad that only two Turkish television channels were willing to broadcast but that became a cult favorite overnight on the Internet.

“Is thinking a crime? Speech not allowed? Is your society excluding you, or forcing you to take sides?” the salesman-style voice-over asks in staccato Turkish. “Move away from fragile systems that are easily toppled. Original Democracy, adhered to by millions around the world, is now available in Turkey!”

The short cartoon would probably not have been possible five years ago, though Cocuklar, which means “Kids” in Turkish, had first proposed a much more confrontational version that was a direct dig at the military. The newspaper that solicited the cartoon, Radikal, though brave, was not foolhardy.

“We believe there is a hidden group of people in Turkey who are bored by this talk,” said Mr. Tumer, fiddling with a green yoyo while sitting at a glass table. “We know you’re not afraid of this scarf. When she takes it off, she still has the same ideas.”

“This paranoia, this tension, for the young generation, it’s just old-fashioned,” he said.

Inherent in Turkey’s progress was a strange contradiction. The state excluded religion from public life and looked down on religious, traditional Turks as backward, yet when they became more integrated in public life, condemned them as enemies of the state.

“Secular urban forces headed by the army look at these people as if they were aliens from outer space,” said Dogu Ergil, a sociology professor at Ankara University. “But they are the products of the very regime that left them out.”

As Turkey moves ahead, it will have to grapple with where Islam fits in the building of an equitable society. Almost all Turks, after all, are practicing Muslims. But the argument, liberals contend, will not be over whether Islam should be part of the government, but instead over what type of secularism fits best.

Mr. Uskul argues that Turkey’s bid for European Union membership, pushed by Mr. Erdogan’s party, has set it on a course of democracy that virtually guarantees secularism.

“The AK Party is Turkey’s reality,” he said, chewing a cracker at a kebab restaurant. “Turks have to accept it.”

“But it should proceed by showing it’s not a threat to Turkey,” he added. “I am an example of its willingness to reform.”

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul and Tarsus.

Religion at heart of Turkish vote

Devout Muslims say they are marginalized in public life, while secularists fear an erosion of freedoms.
By Laura King
Times Staff Writer

July 21, 2007

ALANYA, TURKEY — Vacationing just a few miles apart on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, the economist from Istanbul and the engineer from Ankara could hardly have more divergent views of a nationwide vote Sunday that is expected to return the ruling party to power — and intensify an ongoing battle over the role of Islam in public life.

The ruling Justice and Development Party, which has roots in political Islam, is "just too Muslim, too radical," said Reha Guner, drinking tea in a cafe just off a crowded beach where European tourists sunbathed topless and beer flowed freely. "They want to hold the country back. That's why these elections are so important."

Down the road, at a resort that caters to religiously observant families, engineer Ahmet Alintuglu said pious Muslims like him often feel marginalized in a republic whose 8-decade-old founding principles mandate a strict separation of Islam and government.

"We're a so-called Muslim country, but we are treated like second-class citizens, even when we are on vacation," Alintuglu said. He and his family, he complained, were forced to pay premium prices to secure the hotel amenities they wanted: gender-segregated swimming pools, modest dress in public areas and a ban on alcohol.

Though parting ways at the ballot box, Guner and Alintuglu had this much in common: Like tens of thousands of Turks, each was cutting short the traditional summer holiday to return home to vote in the parliamentary elections, which are shaping up as among the country's most divisive in recent memory.

The Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials AKP, is expected to garner the largest share of seats, but not enough to render it immune to challenges by the secular-minded opposition.



Picking a president



That could set the stage for months of fresh political warfare over parliament's election of the country's president. The AKP is determined to claim the post, although it has always been held by a resolute secularist.

In April, the AKP put forth as its presidential candidate Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a sophisticated, English-speaking diplomat whose wife wears the head scarf that connotes a devout Muslim woman.

For secularists, the notion of such a first lady proved a psychological tripwire. Huge protest rallies were held, the military threatened to step in to preserve secular principles, and the Constitutional Court, citing a technicality, threw out a parliamentary vote that favored Gul.

The standoff left both sides furious, with AKP supporters accusing the secular establishment of acting undemocratically, and secular parties insisting that the AKP, despite a record focused on successfully fostering economic growth, had revealed its hidden Islamist agenda.

The AKP managed to push through a package of constitutional reforms that would change the means of picking the president to a popular vote, but outgoing President Necdet Sezer ensured that the package itself must be put to a referendum. That will not take place until October, well after the new parliament's one-month deadline for electing a new president to a seven-year term.

For a campaign taking place against such an acrimonious backdrop, the electioneering has been almost incongruously peaceful. On almost every major boulevard, colorful party banners flutter like sheets on clotheslines. Sound trucks ply the streets, playing scratchy-sounding versions of pop tunes appropriated as campaign jingles, with rewritten lyrics that blandly extol the virtues of the Turkish nation.

At its campaign rallies, though, the AKP has been tapping into the simmering anger of supporters who believe the party was robbed of the presidency. "The Cankaya will be ours!" the crowd shouted at a recent rally in Istanbul, referring to Turkey's presidential palace.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his voice hoarsened by back-to-back appearances in the final week of campaigning, assured backers of imminent victory. "We'll bury them at the ballot box," he told a cheering, flag-waving throng.

Polls suggest that the AKP will secure about 45% of the vote, twice as much as its nearest rival and enough to secure a comfortable majority in the 550-member parliament, given how seats are apportioned. Many analysts, however, say the party's appeal is due as much to the booming economy as to ideological considerations.

During its five years in power, the AKP has presided over the longest period of uninterrupted growth in the country's recent history, with per capita income more than doubling and rampant inflation largely tamed. That growth spurt has engendered a phenomenon previously unseen in Turkey: a religiously devout middle class prepared to exercise its political clout as well as flex its economic muscle.

The AKP has "created a new bourgeoisie," said columnist Cuneyt Ulsever of the Hurriyet daily newspaper. "That's a departure from the tradition of an almost exclusively secular middle class. So the picture here is not only one of a political struggle, or a religious one; there are class issues as well."

Much of the dynamic economic growth has been generated by the so-called "Anatolian tigers," a grouping of exportoriented industries in the religiously conservative Turkish heartland that have benefited hugely from the government's free-market policies.

One key element of the AKP's break from Turkey's insular, cartel-style economy has been its push to join the European Union. Although those hopes have dimmed in recent months, the membership drive has spurred calls for reform in other areas, including press freedom and human rights.

Analysts say Turkey's particular brand of political Islam, as exemplified by the AKP, is unique in the Muslim world.

"It's progressive and outward-looking — the most evolved of anywhere in a Muslim-majority country," said Soner Cagaptay, director of the Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The secular parties, by contrast, have a strong streak of authoritarianism, often invoking the army's right to intervene in politics in its self-declared role as the guardian of the secular state. At street rallies this spring, many marchers also gave vent to anti-American and anti-European sentiments, blaming Western powers for meddling in Turkey's internal affairs.



Secularists are wary



But the secularists' fears that the AKP will seek to erode the separation of religion and state are very real. The party, which is a breakaway branch of an Islamist movement that came to the fore in the 1980s and '90s, made abortive attempts early in its tenure to criminalize adultery and ease the restrictions on the wearing of head scarves in public universities and other government institutions.

Even though the AKP insists that such measures are no longer part of its platform, there is deep distrust among secularists, particularly women, who believe that they have the most to lose by any state-mandated imposition of religious values.

"It matters more to me because I am a woman," said Hayal Ersoz, a 20-year-old university student wearing tight jeans and glittery sandals. "I don't want to limit anyone's freedom to express their religious beliefs, but I want to work where I please, and dress as I please, and I don't believe I will be able to do that if they have all the power."

By that, most secularists mean they draw the line at an AKP member becoming president. Because the post has veto power over legislation, the president is seen as a check on the ruling party's power.

Despite the AKP's insistence that it will lay claim to the presidency once a new parliamentary mandate has been secured, some analysts say there are signs that Erdogan will seek a compromise. In recent weeks, the party's list of candidates has been purged of dozens of people with a reputation for hard-line religious views.

"In the end, most of the Turkish public is comfortable with a mixture of secularism and religion in their daily lives," said Fadi Hakura, an analyst at the London-based think tank Chatham House.

"And the indications are that the party really does intend to pursue a reformist line. But the question is whether the antagonism with the secular establishment is already too great for that to go forward."

laura.king@latimes.com

Religiosity, Not Radicalism Is New Wave in Indonesia

By SETH MYDANS

TANGERANG, Indonesia — When Lt. Col. Antonius Tihadi confronts a couple in a hotel room, he does so very politely.

“We don’t kick down the door or anything like that,” he said.

Under a local ordinance that includes elements of Islamic Shariah law, Colonel Tihadi heads the enforcement unit that raids shops selling alcohol, interrogates women who are out alone at night and arrests unmarried couples for “immoral behavior.”

“We ask politely to see their documents,” he said. “If they do not have the same address we ask them separately to tell us the names of their in-laws. If they don’t know that, they aren’t married.”

This is the extreme version of the possible future of Indonesia, where as many as 50 communities have adopted similar Shariah regulations in recent years.

A conservative tide is challenging the moderate, tolerant traditions of the world’s most populous Muslim nation. But most analysts doubt that Tangerang, an industrial city of 1.5 million people adjacent to the capital, Jakarta, is a model for a future Indonesia, despite the emergence in the country of hard-line organizations and Islamic political parties, an increase in Islamic head scarves among women and periodic attacks by terrorist groups.

“There is a view that Islam is on the march,” said Greg Fealy, an expert on Indonesia at the Australian National University. “I don’t see any evidence for that.”

“Yes, there is a religious and cultural Islamization, in private and public,” he added. “But in the political realm, there is hardly any evidence to support the view that Islam is rising.”

Some analysts say the Shariah ordinances are in large part a response to economic hardships, colored by a rise in religious devotion that mostly has nothing to do with radicalism.

More broadly, they say, this Islamic ferment is a product of the democratic clamor unleashed in 1998 when the longtime strongman Suharto was driven from power.

The change in mood can be seen on campuses, where students who demonstrated for democracy a decade ago are forming Islamic associations and turning toward religion. The short skirts of the past have been replaced by Muslim head scarves.

“Democracy is like a gate that is opened to let people say what they want,” said Budi, a student at the secular University of Indonesia who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name. “Having the door open wider, it was easier for us to promote Islamic values and teaching.”

Nearly 90 percent of Indonesia’s 235 million people call themselves Muslims. But Indonesian Islam has a history of accommodation of other beliefs and tolerance for differences.

After Muslim traders brought their religion in the 12th century, the Indonesian version of Islam embraced elements of the Hinduism, Buddhism and animism that flourished here. It is still characterized more by the mysticism of these roots than by the orthodoxy of Islamists.

“Indonesia has these awful political crises,” said Robert W. Hefner, an expert on Indonesian Islam at Boston University. “But one thing that has consistently survived is this kind of sweet nationalism, not a racist nationalism — it’s a multiethnic thing.”

The tension between Islam and secular democracy goes back to the founding of the nation in 1945, when the Islamists failed in their attempt to insert into the Constitution what are known here as the seven words. They translate into English as “with obligation for Muslims to practice Shariah.” Islamist delegates to Parliament tried again to insert the phrase after the fall of Suharto and were rebuffed in 2002.

Militant Islam has found little support among the public, analysts say, and is unlikely to be a strong force in shaping the country’s future.

“In my experience, Indonesian Islam will remain tolerant, remain moderate,” said Azyumardi Azra, director of the graduate school at Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University. “Of course there is growing conservatism, but not in terms of becoming more radical.”

Indonesians overwhelmingly say they support Shariah, said Mr. Azyumardi, who has studied public attitudes on the question. For most, though, Shariah means Muslim morality rather than the imposition of Muslim law.

“When you ask them if they support Shariah in a general way, they support it,” he said. “They think of prayer, fasting, the hajj” — the journey to the holy city of Mecca.

But he said most of these same people say they do not support the imposition of restrictive Islamic law, which includes punishments like flogging or stoning for adultery.

“The implementation of ‘Shariah’ is not Shariah,” he said of municipalities like Tangerang. “These so-called laws against prostitution and alcohol and moral issues are only bylaws with Islamic colors.”

The exception is the province of Aceh, which until last year fought a separatist war against the government and was granted special autonomy. It has adopted a fairly strict Shariah law that includes public canings, but even there the strictures are contentious.

The Muslim political parties that emerged after the fall of Suharto have learned the hard way about the public’s wariness of their Islamist agenda. Together, they have never drawn more than about one-fifth of the electoral vote, and they have mostly stopped talking about Shariah in their campaigns.

The Justice and Welfare Party, one of the largest of these parties, now campaigns as the party of clean government and public service, though Shariah law remains one of its founding principles.

“Islamic state, blah blah, not an issue,” said Zulkieflimansyah, a member of Parliament who is a leading voice among the party’s younger generation. Shariah law, he said, is much less than it is cracked up to be.

He agreed that it was economic hardship that drives the popularity of Shariah ordinances among people whose lives have not improved under a decade of democratic rule.

This seems to have been the story in Tangerang, which was badly hit by the economic crash of 1997.

Hard times brought a rise in crime, prostitution and narcotics and an epidemic of alcoholism that spread into surrounding villages, said Dewi Gustiana, the Tangerang reporter for the daily newspaper Suara Pembaruan.

“People were asking the government to do something, and there was pressure from groups trying to introduce Muslim values,” she said.

The regulations were adopted in 2005 and enforcement fell to a local civil police force of about 200 officers. The work has been steady. In May, according to their own count, it raided 10 places selling alcohol, arrested one woman in a hotel room and arrested another on the street.

There have been complaints, Ms. Dewi said. Among other things, the force has been detaining young women factory workers no their way home from night shifts. The government suggested a dress code that has nothing to do with head scarves. If a woman wants to avoid arrest as she waits for her bus home at night, officials said, she should be sure to wear her factory uniform.