Turkish Ex-Premier Gets Jail for Incendiary ’94 Speech

A Turkish court on Friday convicted Necmettin Erbakan, a former prime minister and Islamist leader, of “provoking hatred” in a 1994 speech and sentenced him to a year in jail.

The Diyarbakir State Security Court verdict further dimmed Erbakan’s chances of returning to active parliamentary politics and sparked criticism from the main opposition Islamic party.

Erbakan, 74, has been banned from party politics since 1998, when a high court outlawed his Welfare Party for attempting to subvert Turkey’s secular Constitution.

“The accused is sentenced to one year in jail . . . with the view that the crime has been established,” Chief Judge Fahrettin Gultekin told the court. Erbakan was not present for the ruling.

Mehmet Ener, a lawyer for the former premier, said there would be an appeal.

Prosecutors cited a 1994 election campaign speech in which Erbakan railed against the secularist establishment. Erbakan accused the establishment of dividing Turks and Kurds by replacing Islam-based public life with a secular and nationalist ideology.

Modern Turkey emerged from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, founded on strictly secularist principles by Kemal Ataturk.

Erbakan became the first Islamist prime minister of officially secular Turkey in 1996 but was forced from office a year later in a campaign spearheaded by the powerful military.

The army sees itself as the custodian of Ataturk’s legacy.

Authorities have maintained a clampdown on the perceived danger from political Islam since then. Welfare’s successor, the Virtue Party, now faces the threat of closure by a court on charges of trying to replace the modern constitution with one based on Islamic Sharia law.

Virtue Party leader Recai Kutan described the ruling against Erbakan as a “disgrace” for Turkish democracy.

“This verdict has proved just how valuable our struggle for human rights and democracy is,” Kutan said.