Saldıray'dan Memleket Manzaraları

Reuters News

PARIS, June 30 (Reuters) – France’s foreign minister called Turkey’s army a force for democracy on Monday, appearing to endorse its political role amid accusations it is behind a legal attempt to oust the country’s elected ruling party.

Bernard Kouchner, long an outspoken human rights campaigner, said it would be an “internal matter” if the Constitutional Court banned the governing AK Party, although it could affect Turkey’s European Union entry bid.

His comments to reporters came a day before France takes over the EU presidency and a Turkish prosecutor presents the legal case for banning the AK Party. Some party backers say the army is behind the case.

The court is due to begin hearings this week on a state prosecutor’s attempt to have the conservative party, rooted in political Islam, closed down amid widespread expectations that the AKP will be banned in August, possibly triggering elections.

“The army has played a very important role in Turkey for democracy and the separation of mosque and state,” Kouchner said, noting that the Court had overturned a law allowing women to wear the Islamic headscarf in universities.

The Turkish military sees itself as a guardian of the country’s secular constitution and has intervened four times in the last 50 years to oust governments, most recently in a soft coup to oust an Islamist-leaning government in 1997.

The prosecutor accuses the AK party of subverting Turkey’s secular order and plotting to establish an Islamic state, charges it strenuously denies. Turkish courts have banned some 20 parties in the past for Islamist or Kurdish activities.

The prosecutor wants the AK Party closed over charges of anti-secular activities and leading figures, including Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, banned from party membership for five years.

Asked how the EU should respond to such a ban, Kouchner appeared to rule out suspending Ankara’s membership negotiations with the 27-nation bloc, even though French President Nicolas Sarkozy has repeatedly said Turkey has no place in Europe.

The minister said France expected to open EU talks with Turkey on two or three more of the 35 chapters, or policy areas, into which community law is divided, during its six months in the chair.

“It is the (French) president who decides, but I think that if we want a Union for the Mediterranean, then Turkey has to be part of it. No one can be a better bridge between the Islamic world and Europe,” he said.

EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn has said it is not normal in a European democracy for a court to outlaw a democratically elected governing party, unless it advocates or practices the violent overthrow of the democratic order.

However, he has stopped short of saying whether Brussels would recommend formally suspending Ankara’s accession talks.

Some senior EU officials say the Union would be more likely to informally put the negotiations on hold, at least until there was a democratic clarification of the situation, if the AK party were banned and Erdogan ousted.

Although predominantly Muslim, Turkey was founded as a secular state in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. (editing by edited by Richard Meares)