Pro-Islamic Leader Starts Trying to Form Government in Turkey

Pro-Islamic leader Necmettin Erbakan began trying to form a new Turkish government Tuesday, just as the terrorist slaying of a leading businessman reminded Turks that violence could be the price of growing political uncertainty.

“We expect the prayers of our 65 million people . . . will work with the love of faith, night and day, to form a government,” Erbakan said after President Suleyman Demirel gave him 45 days to find a coalition partner.

Erbakan’s disciplined Welfare Party won 158 parliamentary seats in the Dec. 24 general election, narrowly coming in first with promises of clean government, the expulsion of a U.S.-led force protecting the Kurds of northern Iraq and a rejection of the Western alliance in favor of a Muslim commonwealth.

However, the other four parties in the 550-seat assembly, which represent more than two-thirds of the mostly secular-minded electorate, have ruled out a deal with the 69-year-old Erbakan. None appears to believe Erbakan’s honeyed promises that he meant nothing by all his colorful anti-Western, anti-Israel and anti-establishment rhetoric.

“Don’t let anybody think this will end before March,” warned Gungor Mengi, chief commentator of the popular daily newspaper Sabah.

The head of the center-right True Path Party, Tansu Ciller--whose coalition government collapsed in September--will continue as acting premier.

Many Turks remember the opportunistic Erbakan’s role in the political instability of the 1970s, when he was deputy prime minister with different partners in three governments. That weakness brought violence that killed 20 people a day and led to a 1980-83 military takeover.

The specter of violence was raised again Tuesday when one or more left-wing guerrillas killed Ozdemir Sabanci, a senior member of Turkey’s second-richest business dynasty; Haluk Gorgun, the Turkish manager of the Sabancis’ joint auto-making venture with Toyota; and a secretary.

The attackers entered Istanbul’s landmark Sabanci Center and made their way to the executive suite on the 25th floor. Their victims were killed with a single shot to the head, and a left-wing flag was left as a calling card, a police statement said.

The Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front claimed responsibility for the slayings. The group is an offshoot of Dev-Sol, whose roots go back to the political violence of the 1970s and which killed several foreigners, including two Americans, in the early 1990s.

The group’s statement said that Tuesday’s killings were to avenge the “murder of revolutionary people’s fighters,” apparently a reference to the deaths of three prisoners in Istanbul’s Umraniye prison last week when security forces brutally suppressed a revolt there.

The inmates’ deaths sparked five days of riots that spread to 10 prisons, until the government Monday suspended two senior officials at the Umraniye facility.

Left-wing passions are, however, still running high as a result of police actions, including the burial of one of the dead prisoners by helmeted police after relatives refused to take part in the funeral, the beating of mourners and the mysterious death of a left-wing reporter after he was taken into custody by police.