Turkish Secularists Win Parliament’s Nod

Secularists sealed their triumph over a fallen Islamist-led government Saturday as Parliament gave Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz’s new ruling coalition an inaugural vote of confidence.

The 281-256 vote followed a rowdy debate, punctuated by fistfights, that reflected months of social and political tensions over the role of religion in public life.

“A new era has opened in Turkish history,” a somber-looking Yilmaz told the deputies after the dust settled. “We will work to restore normality in Turkey. The people are fed up with tensions.”

The vote came almost exactly a year after Necmettin Erbakan became modern Turkey’s first Islamist prime minister. His stormy tenure ended with his June 18 resignation, prompted by secular army generals who accused him of promoting fundamentalism and threatened to oust him by force.

President Suleyman Demirel then asked Yilmaz, 50, leader of the center-right Motherland Party, to form a government. The coalition includes former Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit’s Party of the Democratic Left and a small center-right party.

Their minority coalition, which has 217 seats in the 550-member Parliament, won Saturday’s vote by drawing support from other parties, including defectors from the secularist True Path Party of former Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, who was Erbakan’s coalition partner.

Deputies came to blows--and one began waving a pistol--after a deputy unfurled a banner calling an Islamist lawmaker “a great pimp.” The Parliament chairman adjourned the session for 10 minutes and ordered several lawmakers out of the chamber before voting resumed.

Turkey’s secular establishment has been rejoicing since Erbakan’s fall, but Western observers say it is too early to proclaim the demise of political Islam in Turkey.

“If anything, the Islamists will emerge even stronger from this crisis because they are widely perceived to have been unfairly persecuted by the military,” a senior Western diplomat said.

Hashim Hashimi, an ethnic Kurdish deputy from Erbakan’s Welfare Party and one of the Islamist leader’s most strident critics, said: “If we had been allowed to remain in power, we would have discredited ourselves for good because, frankly, we were completely unprepared to run the country. We were making a mess.”

Hashimi said his party had been losing support among its hard-core supporters because of Erbakan’s failure to fulfill campaign promises. These included pledges to cancel a military cooperation agreement with Israel and to lift bans on Islamic-style head scarves in government offices and public schools.

“Now the military has provided us with the excuse we needed” in the next election campaign--”that we were not given time to carry out our program,” Hashimi said.

The Islamists have branded Yilmaz a “puppet” of the military, an image he will be hard-pressed to erase. His government program, announced last week, includes curbs on the proliferation of religious training schools and other anti-Islamist measures that the generals had demanded of Erbakan--and that he resisted to the end.

Yilmaz has also pledged to press for acceptance of Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization member, into the European Union and to attack the country’s double-digit inflation, rising unemployment and widening budget deficit.

A more immediate challenge facing Yilmaz, however, is to keep his government from collapsing.

“This government does not have the staying power, so it is obviously not going to get anywhere,” Erbakan said after Saturday’s vote. “Let’s see how many days it will last. You’ll notice I am talking about days.”