New Islamic party to be set up in Turkey

30/03/2001| IslamWeb

ANKARA, (AFP) - The former leader of Turkey's banned pro-Islamic Virtue Party, Recai Kutan, announced Tuesday that a new political entity intended to unite the Islamic movement in Turkish politics was being set up as swiftly as possible. (Read photo caption below).

"The name and the leaders, who will be democratically elected, of our new party will be decided as soon as possible," Recai Kutan told a press conference at parliament.
The founding members are to be made up of the Virtue Party's hundred deputies, former deputies and intellectuals, Kutan indicated.
Turkey's constitutional court outlawed the pro-Islamic party for anti-secular activities on Friday, but expelled only two of its 102 deputies from parliament in a move appeared aimed at avoiding political turmoil.
Amid a power-struggle between reformists and conservatives, Kutan appealed for unity, warning that division would weaken the Islamist movement.
Although it remains unclear as to who will lead the new party, the two key figures in contention are Tayyip Erdogan, a former mayor of Istanbul, and Former Islamist prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan.
Erdogan, leader of the modernist wing, previously indicated that he was prepared to form a new party.
Erdogan received a four-month prison sentence in 1999 for religious and racial provocation. He is banned from political life but his lawyers are contesting the ban.
Erbakan a pioneer of Islamist policies in Turkey -- banned from politics for five years in 1998 after the closure of his Prosperity Party -- has been involved in negotiations with Kutan to unite the movement.
According to a recent poll by a Turkish newspaper, 74 percent of Islamic voters would vote for a party led by Erdogan as opposed to 14 percent for Erbakan.
PHOTO CAPTION:
Virtue Party leader Recai Kutan (2nd L), flanked by his deputies, attends Friday prayers in a mosque grounds in Ankara June 22, 2001, a few hours before a Constitutional Court verdict to ban his Islam based party. Turkey's Constitutional Court banned the chief opposition party on Friday but stopped short of large scale expulsions from parliament that would have triggered by-elections and thrown IMF-backed financial reforms into doubt. The court ruled that there were grounds to ban the Virtue Party, which controlled 102 out of 550 seats, as a focus of Islamist and anti-secular activities. REUTERS/Anatolian