8th Minister Leaves Turkish Government

This country’s highly influential economy minister, Kemal Dervis, resigned Saturday under pressure from beleaguered Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit.

The resignation prompted widespread concern among Western diplomats here that Dervis’ departure will undermine a crucial economic recovery program supported by about $31 billion in international loans.

“Dervis is the program. He is the sole remaining shred of credibility in an otherwise dead government,” said one Western diplomat, who requested anonymity.

Dervis, 52, was brought back from a position at the World Bank in Washington more than a year ago to oversee the recovery program crafted by the International Monetary Fund after Turkey plunged into its worst economic crisis since World War II.

The economy has shrunk by 10% over the last year, leaving about 2.2 million Turks unemployed.

Dervis, who is widely credited with averting the sort of economic meltdown suffered by Argentina, belongs to no political party. However, he is expected to run for parliament as the standard-bearer for a coalition of leftist and centrist parties that he is hoping to forge ahead of nationwide elections to be held Nov. 3.

The Princeton-trained economist had been facing mounting criticism for remaining in the Ecevit government while forging close links with a rival party set up last month by a former foreign minister, Ismail Cem. Ecevit is widely believed to have delivered his former protege an ultimatum to either sever ties with Cem or quit.

Cem is among seven other Cabinet ministers who have left Ecevit’s government in a protracted political crisis that has paralyzed the nation in recent months and that prompted parliament to call for elections about 18 months ahead of schedule.

Ecevit chose a little-known lawmaker, Masum Turker, from his own Party of the Democratic Left to replace Dervis. The appointment was sent to President Ahmet Necdet Sezer for approval Saturday.

Dervis tried to resign last month but Sezer persuaded him to stay. Emrehan Halici, a lawmaker from Ecevit’s party, stressed that Turkey’s economic recovery program will continue.

“This program is not based on personalities. It is the program of the government and will be maintained with the same determination,” Halici told private NTV television.

It remained unclear Saturday whether Dervis would join Cem, who says his party’s main goal will be to secure Turkish membership in the European Union. This month, the national legislature approved a raft of reforms aimed at accelerating the country’s acceptance into the European bloc. The measures, hailed by EU governments as a major step forward, included abolishing the death penalty and lifting bans on Kurdish-language education and broadcasts by the country’s minority Kurdish population.

“Without Dervis, Cem has little chance of succeeding,” Hasan Koni, a professor of political science at Ankara University in the capital, said in a telephone interview.

For his part, Dervis said Saturday only that he would pursue efforts to string the country’s fractious left-wing and centrist parties into an alliance capable of challenging a right-wing party that Turkey’s establishment accuses of secretly nurturing a pro-Islamic agenda. Polls forecast that group, the Justice and Development Party--led by Istanbul’s former pro-Islamic mayor, Recep Tayyip Erdogan--winning the upcoming elections by a broad margin.

The prospect is deeply worrying to Turkey’s powerful and strongly secular armed forces, who fear that Erdogan would steer the nation away from its pro-Western course. The Turkish military, which has seized power three times in the last four decades, played a pivotal role in unseating the republic’s first Islamic-led government in 1997.

Turkey, the sole majority-Muslim member in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is counted among the United States’ closest regional allies, a role that has been enhanced by its strong ties with Israel and more recently by its leadership of the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. Turkey could be expected to play a key role in any U.S.-led military operation to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Its cooperation would probably be assured if the staunchly pro-Western Dervis attained power.

A darling of Istanbul’s highflying industrial elite, Dervis is also very popular among ordinary Turks because of his industriousness and probity, rare commodities in the country’s scandal-spattered political class.

“With Dervis, what you see is what you get,” said Zeynep Gogus, a prominent economic commentator who has interviewed Dervis several times since his return to Turkey. “He is a through-and-through idealist. His only concern is to serve the Turkish people.”

But some analysts questioned whether Dervis can survive in the byzantine world of Turkish politics, not least because he has spent most of his professional life in the United States.

Koni, the political scientist, disagreed.

“The Turkish people are so fed up with the current set of politicians that they believe only someone coming from the West, from America, can solve their problems,” he said. “That man is Kemal Dervis.”