TURKEY'S new government sailed through a confidence vote that sidelined the pro Islamic party yesterday in one of the few parliamentary tests it is likely to pass with ease.
The conservative coalition of the Prime Minister, Mr Mesut Yilmaz, won the vote by 257 to 20, a comfortable margin despite the lack of an absolute majority in the 550 seat assembly.
"We thank the parliament which has just given us a vote of confidence," Mr Yilmaz said from the podium after the result.
He was helped past the post by the Democratic Left Party of Mr Bulent Ecevit, whose MPs made up most of the 80 abstentions. A staunch secularist, Mr Ecevit is bent on keeping the Islamist Welfare Party (RP) out of office but is expected to place obstacles in the way of the new government's free market programme.
The RP came first in inconclusive general elections last December but subsequently failed to find coalition partners.
The RP leader, Mr Necmettin Erbakan, who advocates loosening Turkey's close ties to the West, was the first party leader to shake Mr Yilmaz's hand following the vote.
Mr Yilmaz came to office under a power sharing agreement with his predecessor, Ms Tansu Ciller, Turkey's first woman prime minister and a bitter personal rival. Ms Ciller is to remain as an ordinary MP until taking over the reins of power again for two years in January 1997.
Meanwhile in Izmir, lawyers said that 16 Turks, mostly teenage students, who went on trial for far left activities on Tuesday were brutally tortured by police. A defence lawyer, Ms Pelin Erda, said that police randomly detained the 16 in Manisa, near Izmir, and tortured them for 10 days, stripping them, anally raping them with batons, giving them electric shocks, hosing them with pressurised water and beating them.
Some of the 16 who included males and females had to be taken to hospital with internal bleeding and psychological problems, she said.
The defendants, mostly aged 15 to 18 but including several in their 20s, are charged with belonging to left wing guerrilla groups, displaying banners with left wing slogans and throwing a petrol bomb at a barber's shop.