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STATON R. WINTER/GETTY IMAGES for TIME |
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| CROSSED PATHS: Campaign flags from the nationalist MHP festoon a busy Istanbul Street |
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| Turkey On The Spot |
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Next week Turks choose a new government. But as a crucial player in a war against Iraq, the country must also choose between East and West
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By ANDREW PURVIS |
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Posted Sunday, October 28, 2002; 15:07GMT
The streets of the ancient city of Diyarbakir in south-eastern Turkey teem with vegetable hawkers and oxcarts, men in baggy cotton pants and women in silver-fringed headscarves. At the Ottoman bazaar, you can sip sugary tea and watch goldsmiths mold trinkets by lamplight. To the south lie the plains of Syria and the Middle East; to the east, the craggy mountains of northern Iraq. It all seems a long way from Europe. As the guidebooks say, here begins Asia.
Don't tell that to the Turks. Suleiman Ates, 57, a grizzled herder from a small village in the hills north of town, insists he lives elsewhere. "Europa! Europa!" he cries when asked whether he feels more European or Asian. For someone who has spent his life herding cattle in the remote valleys of the upper Euphrates, Ates displays an amazing grasp of Brussels minutiae. "Turkey will have no problems if she meets the Copenhagen criteria" for European Union membership, he says over a plate of yoghurt and honey.
Turks remain passionately, indiscriminately pro-European, even though Brussels has made it clear it's none too keen to have them join the E.U. From Kurds in the southeast to imams in central Anatolia to U.S.-educated stockbrokers in Istanbul, nearly 70% see joining the European Union as the solution to their many problems: an economy that shrank by 9% last year and is still mired in its worst crisis since World War II; a threatened war with Iraq that could not only scuttle a recovery but also cause a new flare-up with Kurdish separatists in the southeast; and a ruling coalition that has been a shambles since it collapsed amid bitter infighting in July.
Turks may look to the E.U. as their savior, but solutions are more likely to come — if they come at all — from the Nov. 3 general election. The vote may provide the latest answer to the eternal question of whether this staunch Western ally and sole Muslim member of NATO is drifting toward Islamic rule. It will tell markets and frightened investors whether economic reforms imposed by the International Monetary Fund as a condition for a $16 billion loan package are likely to stay on track. And it could even give an indication of whether Turkey's nationalist forces are more likely to rattle their sabers in coming months in Iraq or on Cyprus, the island that has been yanked by a 28-year tug-of-war between Turkey and Greece but is now set to enter the E.U. long before Turkey ever does.
One thing is sure. The old bums are out. Voters will vent their anger against the incumbents — whose tenure was marked by charges of corruption and economic mismanagement — by turfing out every party in the current coalition. The Democratic Left Party (DSP) of Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit, for example, has managed just 1.5% in the most recent polls, nowhere near the 10% threshold required to enter the Turkish parliament. The Republican Peoples' Party (CHP), founded in 1923 by Kemal Atatürk and joined recently by the urbane former Economy Minister Kemal Dervis, is doing a lot better with 17.2%.
As they have in every election over the past 12 years, Turks are ready to embrace the unknown. The front-runner, with 29.6%, is Justice and Development (AK), a brand-new party with no government experience made up mainly of Islamists — people who favor a society based on Islamic principles — who insist, confusingly, that they are nothing of the kind. The AK's charismatic leader is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul and the country's most popular politician. But in a further twist of Turkey's conflicted relationship with Islam — the nation's secular rulers have for decades used draconian laws to forestall the rise of fundamentalism — Erdogan was last week banned from standing as a candidate owing to a 1998 conviction for violating Turkey's secular laws.
That hasn't hurt his party's standing; it may have even helped. If current trends hold, the AK party will help lead a coalition government with the CHP and Kemal Dervis, or possibly the Nationalist Action Party (MHP). An outside contender is the Young Party, led by media and mobilephone tycoon Cem Uzan, which is campaigning on an anti-IMF platform and the promise of no taxes and free medicine.
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