TURKEY:TURKEY'S GOVERNING party mounted a desperate legal fight for its survival yesterday as documents allegedly showed it had been the target of a foiled coup attempt planned to begin next week.
Facing prosecution demands that it be closed and its leaders barred from politics, the Justice and Development party (AKP) denied accusations that it was seeking to impose sharia law.
The deputy prime minister Cemil Cicek, a former lawyer, told the constitutional court that the charges were a politically motivated drive by the country's secular establishment to unseat a twice-elected popular government.
He was presenting the government's case two days after the chief prosecutor Aburrahman Yalcinkaya told the court that there was a "real and present danger" of an Islamic state emerging under the AKP, which is rooted in political Islam but has a bedrock of broad middle-class support.
Mr Yalcinkaya is seeking to ban 71 of the party's senior figures from politics for five years - including the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and President Abdullah Gul - on the grounds that they want to dismantle the secular reforms introduced by the republic's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
In its response, the AKP argued that it was trying to further Ataturk's modernising agenda with economic development, expanded human rights and EU membership.
The court is not expected to deliver a verdict until next month at the earliest. If it votes for the ruling party's closure, as is widely anticipated, it could herald an early general election, which a new party formed from the ashes of the AKP would probably contest.
Yesterday's legal arguments came as prosecutors said they were ready to press terrorism charges after compiling a 2,500-page indictment in a separate case in which the AKP has accused a militant secularist cabal, Ergenekon, of seeking its violent overthrow.
Investigators this week arrested 21 people suspected of being linked to the alleged plot, including two retired generals, a journalist and the head of Ankara's chamber of commerce.
The suspects allegedly planned to provoke a military intervention with a series of explosions and assassinations of prominent figures, including judges and the Nobel prizewinning novelist Orhan Pamuk. The pro-AKP newspaper Sabah reported yesterday that documents uncovered by investigators showed that 40 unauthorised anti-government rallies had been scheduled for next Monday as the prelude to a chain of disruptive events and violent confrontations.
Sixty people have been arrested since the inquiry began last year. Many belong to the Kemalist Thought Association, a group swearing loyalty to Ataturk.
- (Guardian service)