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Turkey's government
So far so good
Turkey's new government may even help break the
stalemate over Cyprus
NEARLY two weeks after the Justice and Development
(AK) party swept to victory in a general election,
millions of Turks who voted for it discovered who
their prime minister was to be: Abdullah Gul, a cheery,
soft-spoken former banker, who is the number two in
the Islamic-tinged party, which he helped found last
year.
Turkey's western allies and creditors are pleased. So,
it seems, are the country's industrial elite and
secular-minded generals. Mr Gul immediately affirmed
that two of his main goals are to maintain Turkey's
strategic partnership with the United States and to
put his country firmly on the path towards joining the
European Union.
Born into a humble family in the conservative
Anatolian province of Kayseri, Mr Gul, 52, spent a
chunk of his career in academia and as an economist at
the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia,
before falling under the spell of Necmettin Erbakan,
the erratic founder of Turkey's Islamist movement. But
he soon became one of Mr Erbakan's fiercest critics
during the latter's brief stint as Turkey's first
Islamic prime minister, which ended when the generals
shoved him out after a year, in 1997, on the
questionable grounds that he was seeking to steer the
country towards Sharia rule. Joined by some 50
like-minded moderates, Mr Gul broke away from Mr
Erbakan's lot to form AK, as the party is invariably
called, its initials meaning "white" or "clean" in
Turkish. Mr Gul is hugely popular among the party's
rank and file. Western diplomats like him too.
But Turkey's real boss is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the AK
leader, who was barred from becoming prime minister
because of a previous conviction for allegedly seeking
to stir up religious hatred by reciting a nationalist
poem in public. Since the AK dominates parliament, a
law is likely to be passed in the coming months to let
Mr Erdogan officially take charge-and take over Mr
Gul's job as prime minister.
To underline this, Mr Erdogan unveiled his
government's "urgent action plan" before a big crowd
of journalists, just as Mr Gul was being quietly
anointed prime minister by Ahmet Necdet Sezer,
Turkey's president. Mr Erdogan has already fulfilled
his campaign promise to cut Turkey's bloated cabinet
from 36 to 25 ministers.
Not all those appointed to the new government won
universal approval. Indeed, the keenly pro-secular
President Sezer refused to accept one of them, Besir
Atalay, as education minister. Mr Atalay is a former
university dean who had apparently been sacked for
recruiting Islamic-minded teachers to help him
campaign for the lifting of bans on Islamic-style
headgear (in particular, the headscarf for women) on
campus. As a result of Mr Sezer's intervention, Mr
Atalay has been shifted to another ministerial
post-and his original nomination has been seized on by
some pro-secularists as evidence that Mr Erdogan has
not changed his Islamist spots after all.
But most of the new cabinet are pro-westerners. They
include Ali Babacan, a chirpy American-trained
economist of 35 who will oversee the IMF's programme
of reforms that is already two years old. Then there
is Yasar Yakis, a former diplomat who is the new
foreign minister. An enthusiast for Arabic language
and culture, Mr Yakis has long been a bête noire in
the eyes of the Turkish foreign ministry's snootier
pro-Europeans, sometimes known as the "mon cher"
brigade. Unlike many of them, however, Mr Yakis seems
ready to make concessions over Cyprus in order to
break the 28-year-old stalemate over the island
between its Greeks and Turks.
So, it appears, is Mr Erdogan. He has been visiting
leaders across the EU. His first stop was Athens,
where he declared a new UN plan to reunite the island
as "an acceptable basis for negotiation", although he
described proposals to reduce the size of the
territory controlled by Turkish Cypriots as "abominable".
He also suggested, unrealistically, that, at its grand
summit in Copenhagen next month, the EU should give
Turkey a firm date for starting negotiations over
entry in the Union as part of a deal to clinch a
settlement in Cyprus.
Perhaps even more telling was a declaration by General
Hilmi Ozkok, the chief of Turkey's general staff, that
Cyprus was a matter for the politicians. That marks a
dramatic shift from his predecessors' hawkish tirades
about not giving up one of Turkey's most valuable
strategic assets.
Nov 21st 2002 | ANKARA
From The Economist print edition
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