Can Islamists tackle Turkey's rights?

This is the second segment of three artovle on Turkey's Islamists

By John Hooper

ISTANBUL: Lale Mansur emerged from the dispersing crowd looking as serenely beautiful as circumstances allowed. The film star and former prima ballerina of the Istanbul state ballet had been among hundreds of people sitting down in the road by the Galatasaray bazaar.

There has been a sit-in there every Saturday for the past 63 weeks, held to protest at Turkey's disappearances.

The demonstrations are intended to be non-political. But sometimes, as on this occasion, a left wing group will join in, chanting slogans against the authorities. And with riot police deployed within a hundred yards, that is no joke.

Disappearances are the latest horror to emerge from the grim dungeon of human rights abuse in Turkey. The report for 1994 of the United Nations' Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances records more disappearances in Turkey than in any other country in the world. Most were in the south-east where the army has been fighting Kurdish separatists for 12 years. In the first six months of this year, according to the Human Rights Association (IHD) in Ankara, 114 people went missing.

"The detention of these people is witnessed, often by relatives," says an IHD official. "Often the relatives get in touch with us. We call the security directorate and they say, 'This person does not figure in our records.' "

The IHD claims it is a way of allowing detainees to be tortured with impunity. It says many are handed over to a covert institution which goes by the chilling title of the Laboratory for In-depth Investigation.

The demonstrations at Galatasaray began after the relatives of one of these disappeared people, a left wing Kurd called Hasan Ocak, found out what had happened. A doctor at the forensic institute in Istanbul invited them to look through the photographic records of unidentified corpses brought in. They identified the missing man and were told his tortured and murdered body had been found in a forest on the Asian side of Bosphorus.

"I felt very sad and angry," says Nadire Mater, one of the organizers of the protests. "A friend called me, and said we should do something."

She says the worst thing about disappearances is that they also lead to the psychological torture of the relatives. "Ojak's father once told me he feels guilty because he at least knows where his son's body is."

Since June, Turkey has been ruled for the first time by a coalition dominated by Islamists. The rise to power of Necmettin Erbakan's Refah (Welfare) party is viewed with dismay by many secular Turks. But, other things being equal, it would seem to hold out hope of an improvement in the country's ghastly human rights record.

In opposition, the Islamists showed concern for humanitarian issues. They have themselves been on the receiving end of officially sponsored repression: 26 cases of alleged torture recorded by the IHD in its report were passed on to it by the pro-Islamist human rights organization, Mazlumder.

However, the president of Turkey's Human Rights Foundation, Yavuz Onen, says other things are not equal.

"Maybe Refah does have a genuine humanitarian commitment," he says. "Maybe the Islamists would like to try to solve the Kurdish problem in a different way. Maybe they are against torture, against disappearances. But they don't have the power to put their ideas into practice.

"They are the government, but they do not enjoy the real power of the state, because this is a system based on military force." After the last coup in 1980, the constitution was amended to give a key role to the National Security Council, a joint government- military body chaired by the president.

"That is the real government," says Onen. "In 20 years, parliament has never rejected a single demand made by the council of the government."

Yet events surrounding the end last month of the hunger strike in which 12 detainees starved to death would seem to suggest the Islamists are not entirely at the mercy of the men in uniform.

A meeting of the National Security Council was held two days before the strike ended. Independent sources close to the negotiations say the armed forces took an unyielding line. They demanded an assault on the prisons to enable the strikers to be force-fed and ordered hospitals to prepare for casualties. In the event, the protest ended peacefully and the government made concessions.

Did it defy the generals, or did the Islamists have enough influence and credibility to dissuade them from their course? The answer is important in the light of another question.

If the Islamists won enough votes to govern alone and set about imposing their ideas more vigorously than at present, would the army, which has always been seen as a guarantor of the country's secular tradition, step in?

A surprising number of Turks have their doubts. The 1980 coup traumatized society in a way that no previous intervention had. It cost the officer corps popularity and credibility, and there is a widespread belief that senior commanders would be deeply reluctant to repeat the experience. Nor is it clear that they are as antipathetic to the Islamists as their predecessors.

"The record of the army since 1980 is more complex than meets the eye," warns Ersin Kalaycioglu, Professor of Political Science at Bosphorus University. "I don't believe that the army now is as secular as it used to be."

He recalls that in the years following the coup the armed forces actively worked to promote the Islamists as an "antidote to communism". The rise of Refah since then has coincided with the decimation of the Turkish left: protest votes once cast for communists, socialists and social democrats have gone to the Welfare party.

The army and the Islamists can also find common ground on the biggest single challenge facing Turkey -- the Kurdish insurrection. As the Kurds, and particularly the PKK, move increasingly towards ethnic nationalism, they have encouraged their opponents to lay greater stress on what the country's other inhabitants have in common with them.

"The army has been using Islam as a force against the Kurds, as a way of forcing national integration," says Prof. Kalaycioglu. A comparable approach was taken only this week by the new Islamist prime minister, Erbakan, when he launched a tentative peace initiative in the spirit of "Muslim brotherhood".

Every modern army's top priority is the territorial integrity of the nation state.

While Refah may be able to create leeway for itself with the army by showing it can act moderately and sensibly, it may be able to create even more by proving something the army's commanders seem already to suspect: that Turkey's religion has a more important role to play than its secular heritage in tackling a crisis that threatens the country's very survival.

-- The Guardian