29.01.1998

Islamist Welfare Party banned

Family feud of Turkish ruling bloc

The Constitutional Court of Turkey has decreed that the Welfare Party, which seeks to establish a regime based on islamic sheria lines, has contravened clauses in the country’s constitution prohibiting political parties based on religion.

The party offices have been closed. Six of its leaders have been expelled from parliament and banned from switching to another political party. They include the chairman of the party, who until very recently was deputy prime minister in the coalition government. Party funds and property were confiscated and the substantial annual subsidy due to be paid to the party in proportion to its representation in parliament was frozen.

However, the islamists had already taken precautions against this long-expected development. They, like the left, are familiar with the whimsical nature of the Turkish constitutional legal system.

This is the 23rd party closed down by the Constitutional Court since 1963, but only the second islamist party. The rest of them, as the reader might guess, were various left organisations. Two islamist parties were also closed down by the martial law authorities.

Welfare Party leaders are now ready to form a new, ‘spare wheel’ organisation. They had the option of doing so in advance, but preferred to await the conditions attached to the court judgement.

Otherwise they were ready. All the party’s property and funds were ‘privatised’ - placed at the disposal of a few trusted members. The state was only able to confiscate two broken down minibuses and a few sticks of furniture at party headquarters. In an added twist of irony, the state became liable for all party debts. Now each and every honest citizen who can prove they lent money or rendered any service to the party may claim it from the state.

Apart from the six banned leaders, the ex-Welfare MPs have been allowed to remain as independents. They constitute almost a third of the parliament - still the largest group with 147 members out a total of 550. However, they will no longer be represented in the commissions and committees of the parliament until they become members of the new party.

Many municipal administrations, including two major cities, are run by ex-Welfare Party, now independent, islamists. The religious foundations and their offsprings, the islamist companies and corporations, continue to generate political funds in and out of Turkey. The ‘illegal’ sects identified with this party are still in operation.

The islamists have displayed a confident and defiant, but guarded mood in response to the judgement. They did not panic. They did not rush into hasty actions. Their organisational structure remains intact. One of their options is to force an early election through mass resignation of their MPs, once the new party becomes operational.

The ban has created new international media interest in Turkey’s affairs. We must however be cautious in our evaluation. First of all, let us remind ourselves that the islamist threat to a secular democratic bourgeois regime in Turkey has not been confined to the Welfare Party.

The islamist forces were aided and abetted by the finance capitalists of Turkey and their state during the late 70s in their attempts to counter the working class and petty bourgeois revolutionary movement. The last remnants of the secularist ideals of early bourgeois Turkey were blown away by the winds of revolutionary crisis and military counterrevolution. The military regime of the 80s went so far in this direction that even their successors of the 90s are now criticising them.

The islamists were still considered a very important ally by Turkish finance capitalists in their colonial war in Kurdistan. The sudden changes in the Central Asian and Caucasus regions after the collapse of Soviet Union gave them a new importance in aiding the Turkish state in their desire to expand into these regions.

However, the islamists were themselves on the offensive against the secular regime, encouraged by the international advance of fundamentalist reaction. This offensive reached beyond the limits of what secular, western-oriented finance capital and the influential petty bourgeoisie were prepared to accept.

The tangible concessions gained by the islamists during the coalition government also alienated another major section of society. The alevis, oppressed for centuries by the sunni state islam, began to show their discontent. The legal and tacit concessions that the other bourgeois political parties were forced to give the islamists in order to cling onto power, even in the form of a coalition government with the Welfare Party, together with the islamists’ success in the local elections, were the straw that broke the camel’s back: A secular backlash became inevitable.

Threatening direct intervention, a military-led bourgeois secular alliance forced the collapse of the coalition government. Since then the Constitutional Court decision to ban Welfare has been on the agenda as a direct result of this backlash.

However, by these actions the state cannot hope to suppress an organised and vocal opposition representing a substantial portion of the population. The finance capitalists want to control it to their benefit, but the beast is not easy to tame. The illusions the islamist have fed to the dissatisfied masses of the city slums and the disintegrating rural communities is very important if those forces are to be kept in check.

Here lies the tragedy of the Turkish left and communists. A very large part of their natural constituency remains under islamist influence, while the bourgeois regime has the greatest of difficulty in ruling in the old way. Yet the Turkish left is in deep ideological crisis and faces organisational disintegration. Far from seizing upon the opportunities the situation presents, it stands aside from these developments in utter aloofness. This only adds to its confusion and disintegration.

The legal, reformist left evaluates this judgement as an onslaught against democracy. The ex-Maoist left, draped in the colours of the early bourgeois revolution, defends the action of army and state as a bulwark against islamist reaction. The so-called revolutionary left claims that this judgement is nothing but an attempt to distort and divert the political agenda. Some in the same tradition even see the islamists movement as an anti-imperialist ally. The Kurdish nationalist movement is flirting with its own islamist in trying to establish a more powerful coalition against the enemy. The split trade union movement supports this judgement on the one hand and asks for a ‘better’ bourgeois democracy on the other.

Meanwhile the family feud in crisis-ridden Turkey between the secular, finance capitalist-led sections of the bourgeoisie and its islamist reactionary wing is continuing, but without any effective participation of the working class movement.

Osman Aziz