A ruling on a legal bid to dissolve Turkey’s pro-Islamic Virtue Party (VP) will not come before the middle of next week, said Constitutional Court Chief Justice Mustafa Bumin on Friday.
The court convened on Tuesday for final deliberations on the probable ban, a ruling that could have serious repercussions for the already beleaguered government.
"We are going to resume work on Tuesday. A decision will not emerge before the middle of next week," Bumin said, quoted by the Turkish Daily News.
Drawing attention to a proposed amendment to the Constitution which has yet to be seen in Parliament, and that would make it harder to dissolve political parties, Bumin said they would continue their work without being bound by efforts to have the Constitution amended.
When asked his opinion about the proposed amendment, Bumin said he did not believe a three-fifths majority vote, as proposed, was the right thing to do.
“The Constitution currently calls for a two-thirds majority vote," he said, adding that he did approve of the amendment depriving political parties in whole or in part of Treasury funding rather than closing them down completely.
He added that the case file was very large and that there was a great deal of evidence, including video footage, to be studied.
The verdict “will reshape Turkish politics,” and is significant in that it will force the existing and coalescing political parties to map out new strategies, sources told AFP last week.
Analysts cited by the agency predicted that a ban on the the Virtue Party, the main opposition party, was the most likely outcome of the case, which was launched in May 1999 by the country's former chief prosecutor, Vural Savas.
In his indictment, Savas likened the party to a "vampire" feeding off the public's religious feelings and charged that it was an illegal continuation of the now-defunct Welfare Party of former prime minister Necmettin Erbakan.
The VP also stands accused of inciting protests against a headscarf ban in universities and orchestrating a failed bid by one of its MPs in 1999 to take an oath in parliament wearing a headscarf.
Savas demanded that the party be outlawed for anti-secular activities, its leadership be barred from politics for five years and all of its 102 MPs in the 550-seat parliament be removed from office.
But if the constitutional court agrees to remove all of the party's MPs, Turkey will face a broad by-election for the vacant seats or even a general election.
According to AFP, early elections could spell the end of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit's three-party coalition -- Turkey's most stable government since 1995 -- at a time when it is battling a severe economic crisis and striving to achieve its decades-long ambition of European Union membership.
A government change is likely to impede Ankara's program of vigorous economic reforms, backed by a multi billion-dollar loan from the International Monetary Fund, and push the country into further troubles.
In a newspaper interview in February, Ecevit said the VP's chances of emerging unscathed from the case were slim and expressed concern over the grave consequences of a ban.
"Such a development would draw Turkey into uncertainty," Ecevit said.
But the constitutional court has a second option: in a supplementary indictment issued in February, the new chief prosecutor Sabih Kanadoglu demanded that only two Virtue MPs be removed from office.
The ban will tarnish Turkey's image as an EU candidate and deliver a blow to moves to expand liberties and improve democracy in a country which often comes under fire from its Western allies for its bleak rights record, said AFP.
The case is also under scrutiny from by the European Union, which granted Turkey membership candidate status in 1999.
But such a ruling will not mean an end to Virtue's mission of introducing Islam into mainstream politics, as all pro-Islamic parties previously banned by the constitutional court were followed by new formations.
The VP is highly likely to follow the same path.
"Whatever the verdict may be, we will continue on our path," the party's deputy group chairman, Bulent Arinc, said last Monday.
Virtue itself is the successor of Welfare, banned by the constitutional court in 1998 for anti-secular activities. The move came months after Turkey's first Islamist prime minister resigned as a result of an anti-Islamist campaign led by Turkey's military, a staunch defender of secularism -- Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
