Turkey’s Ship of State Drifts Toward Danger

It was Libyan strongman Moammar Kadafi who revealed that something was strangely dysfunctional in this country when, sitting next to the Turkish prime minister in front of Turkish television cameras in October, he freely insulted the creaky pro-Western order here.

Then in November, a car crash killed a rogue police chief--a wanted hit man carrying a diplomatic passport. In the aftermath, the feisty Turkish media unraveled a startling network of links between a Kurdish militia, the heroin trade and organized crime.

The latest blow: In the lobby of a hotel in Budapest, Hungary, a right-wing extremist punched the leader of Turkey’s center-right opposition in the nose because of the opposition leader’s allegations that the government was being taken over by a far-right state-within-a-state.

Alarming trends in Turkish government finances have added to a sense of foreboding. Few here in the capital doubt that, four months after the pro-Islamic Welfare Party came to power, Turkey’s ship of state is drifting toward increasingly turbulent waters.

“Whatever you touch falls apart,” Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan complained to the English-language Turkish Daily News after a month in which an interior minister resigned and several top police chiefs were fired over the killing of a casino king.

Disarray in Turkey’s state institutions has little to do with the moderately pro-Islamic ideology of Erbakan’s Welfare Party, despite the fears of Turkey’s Western allies that this country of 65 million Muslims at the crossroads of Europe and Asia might turn into a new Algeria or Iran.

In fact, 10 years of increasingly weak secular government meant that when Erbakan forged his coalition with former Prime Minister Tansu Ciller’s conservative True Path Party, he assumed the helm of a vessel already taking on water.

“They are not treading water. They are bailing water,” said the senior representative of one international institution in Ankara.

The Welfare Party is bailing hard and, at least in local government, is helped by a reputation for honesty that is notable in Turkish politics.

But Erbakan has kept up the populist economic policies that are the main cause of the country’s problems: forgiving back taxes, dictating bread prices, offering overpriced bonds and budgeting 1997 spending based on what economists say are unrealistic projections.

Still, confidence in the economy has been little dented by the state’s financial woes or an inflation rate that now tops 80% a year. Prices at the stock exchange are at near-record levels, Istanbul markets are awash with foreign currency, and the gross national product is expected to grow by 8% this year.

Economists in Ankara and bankers in Istanbul worry that this balloon of confidence could easily be pricked by Welfare leaders’ outdated understanding of economics or their sometimes clumsy attempts to reorient Turkey’s foreign policy away from its Western alliances and toward the Islamic east.

“The Welfare Party was unprepared for power and still has no overall strategy. They start each day with a blank sheet,” said Fehmi Koru, one of Turkey’s leading pro-Islamic commentators.

Diplomats say Turkey’s military and bureaucratic establishments have effectively blocked the Welfare Party’s tentative steps toward a political solution to the ethnic Kurdish problem. Kurdish guerrillas are fighting for a separate state.

The Welfare Party claims its support is rising from the 21.3% it won in last December’s general election and that supporters understand the obstacles it faces.

“The bureaucracy is holding everything up. But we are not revolutionaries. We will continue step by step toward our goals: devolution and a smaller government,” said senior Welfare Party leader Temel Karamollaoglu.

But the Islamists are having a tough time getting this message across to the public. Determined to make the governing coalition last as long as possible, Erbakan risks appearing a part of the old system.

“The economy is in a very delicate balance,” said a foreign bank chief in Istanbul. The Islamists “came to power as a party of reaction, a reaction to real oppression of Muslim believers. But the longer they are in power, the more the movement will lose force.”