Anti-Government Marchers Clash With Turkish Police

More than 100,000 people angered by one of modern Turkey’s worst economic crises demonstrated across the country and clashed with riot police here in the capital Wednesday, stepping up pressure on the government to resign.

Defying orders to leave Ankara’s main square, part of a surging crowd of 70,000 demonstrators hurled sticks, stones and loose change at the police, then tried to march on the parliament building. Military police backed by armored personnel carriers dispersed the crowd with tear gas and water cannons.

At least 100 police officers, demonstrators and journalists were reported wounded in the Turkish capital’s worst violence in more than 20 years.

Nearly half a million Turks have lost their jobs since a February spat between the nation’s president and prime minister damaged confidence in the government and its anti-inflation program. The lira has lost much of its value against the dollar, and stock markets have slumped to record lows.

“Turkey is like the Titanic,” Cengiz Candar, a prominent liberal commentator, wrote Wednesday. “With each passing day it is sinking further.”

Wednesday’s demonstrations were the largest and most unruly in a week of daily gatherings by Turks demanding firmer action to save the economy. Participants included tens of thousands of provincial shopkeepers who closed their doors in protest.

Echoing calls of anger in the streets, the Turkish Union of Chambers of Commerce and Industry demanded that Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit resign.

Ecevit has resisted calls to step down. He noted Wednesday that those demanding his ouster have failed to come up with an alternative to his eclectic three-party coalition of right- and left-wing nationalists in the parliament elected two years ago.

Neither of Turkey’s main opposition groups appears to have support from the military, an arbiter of Turkish politics, for a chance at trying to form a new parliamentary majority and taking over the government. The larger of the two, the Virtue Party, grew out of the Welfare Party, which led a government that resigned under military pressure in 1997 on charges of trying to introduce Islamic fundamentalist rule.

Ecevit is reported to be weighing a Cabinet shake-up, his second since the currency collapsed.

Known to most Turks as the kriz, the crisis began when President Ahmet Necdet Sezer publicly berated Ecevit for the sluggish pace of a government investigation into its own malfeasance. Turkey’s corruption-riddled banking system and decades of political patronage through state banks are widely blamed for many of the country’s economic ills.

Last month, the government recruited a prominent Turkish economist from the World Bank, Kemal Dervis, to lead a series of economic reforms aimed at securing nearly $12 billion in promised loans from the International Monetary Fund.

Since then, parliament has passed legislation that will privatize tobacco and sugar production, which has long survived on generous government subsidies. And Wednesday, the Turkish armed forces announced that they were postponing $19 billion in defense projects to assist with the austerity drive.

But Ecevit’s coalition has yet to agree on terms for selling off Turkish Airlines, the Turk Telecom phone company and three ailing state banks with combined losses of more than $40 billion.