Turkish Islamists’ Party Shut Down

Turkey’s Islam-based Welfare Party ceased to exist Sunday after losing a bitter fight with the secular establishment over the role of Islam in public life.

“The verdict is published and the party officially closed down now,” a Welfare spokesman said outside party headquarters in Ankara, the capital.

Publication in the official gazette gave legal force to a Constitutional Court verdict issued last month, ending an anxious limbo for the Islamists and their critics.

The verdict shuts down the party and imposes heavy restrictions on Welfare leader and former prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, the 71-year-old architect of political Islam in Turkey.

He and four other Islamists lose their parliamentary seats. Erbakan is barred from political leadership for five years and is expected to hand over the reins of leadership to a younger man.

The veteran leader, who has survived two previous party bans, may also face charges of sedition and contempt of court.

About 150 Welfare deputies now have no party affiliation. They will, however, still constitute the country’s largest opposition group in the 550-seat chamber and are expected to vote as a bloc.

Erbakan, modern Turkey’s first Islamist leader, resigned as prime minister last year under a barrage of criticism from the secularist military and mainstream media.

The court found the party attempted to subvert Turkey’s strict secularist principles while in power.

“The Welfare chairman and some of his assistants and deputies . . . were understood to have used democratic rights and freedoms as tools in order to remove democracy and bring in [Islamic] Sharia law,” the state-run Anatolian News Agency quoted the verdict as saying.

NATO member Turkey is overwhelmingly Muslim but officially secular. Its legal code severely restricts the influence of religion on public life.

But the Islamists have vowed to press on, and dozens of Islamist mayors gathered in Ankara to plan a replacement party.

The prosecutor who brought the closure case against Welfare has already said that any party that purports to be a replacement for Welfare could face the same fate.

Welfare says it intends to appeal against the ban, both to the European Court of Human Rights and to Turkish courts.

The European Union expressed concern last month over the implications of the verdict for democracy in Turkey. In December, the EU shelved Turkey’s membership application, citing human rights and democratization among a list of problems.