Turkish Welfare Party

To Enter the Garden: The Background and Growth of the Recently Banned Turkish Welfare Party

“Destur?” the male dinner guest called anxiously before the closed door of his host’s kitchen where the host’s female family members and guests were busily preparing the dinner. The word, not much heard nowadays, is of ancient Persian origin and signifies a request for permission to do something, especially to enter someone’s private quarters. Here it meant that the guest was requesting his hostess and the other female guests, amongst whom was his own wife, to pass him a jar of cold water through the kitchen door.

This exchange, which might have seemed routine in Riyadh, Kabul or even post-Revolutionary Tehran, caught my attention as I sat with the male guests in a convivial circle in the divan or reception room in the home of a successful contractor in the central part of Istanbul. I was on a visit to Turkey after an absence of 17 years.

In the six years I had lived in that city in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I had been privileged to associate with Turks of all social and economic classes. But never, whether in a gecekondu (“put up in a night”) squatters’ hut or an elegant Bosporus villa, had I encountered such strict segregation of the sexes as at this social gathering.

Hospitality was warm and sincere and the table was filled with the traditional goodies of the Turkish cuisine (minus the intoxicating drinks common in less Islamic homes). The meal was served by the younger sons of the host who had first respectfully kissed the hands of their elders and then seated themselves in the “lower part” of the row of cushioned benches that made up the divan, waiting to be called to help serve.

The diet, the social hierarchy, the “dos and don’ts” of conversation were all dictated by Ottoman-Islamic tradition, which 20 years ago one might have been forgiven for saying was disappearing in Turkey, at least from the urban scene. This, however, was the home of a practicing Muslim and an active member of the Islamist Welfare Party who was also a deputy in the Greater Istanbul City Council in which Welfare occupies the overwhelming majority of seats.

A Turkish proverb states, “Whoever enters a garden without destur may be driven out with a stick.” Members of the recently banned Welfare Party, on the other hand, feel that they are entitled to their place both in the garden and at the table of a democratic Turkey thanks to the electoral results by which they have commanded up to 30 percent of the vote since 1994.

The Welfare Party or Refah Partisi (refah also implies “comfort” or “easy circumstances” in Turkish and Arabic) was a relative newcomer to the political scene. (It may be noted in passing that the names of the other current political parties in Turkey are “pure Turkish” in origin, whereas not only the present name of the party but the names of its two Islamist predecessor parties, Milli Nizam Partisi [National Order Party] and Milli Selamet Partisi [National Salvation Party] use words borrowed from Arabic, even though “Turkic” synonyms for those words exist. Thus the party’s very name subliminally underlines its Ottoman-Islamic roots, since the aggressive use of “pure Turkish” vocabulary is a basic creed of secularist Turkish nationalism.)

The rules of Turkish nationalism were encapsulated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938), founder and first president of the Turkish Republic, who sought to establish a state having a nationalist rather than a religious identity like the Ottoman Empire. It is true that the government which preceded the republic, the constitutional monarchy under the control of the Union Party, which was in power from 1908 to the end of the 1914-1918 war, had attempted to define Ottoman identity by loyalty to a nation-state, to a given territory and to the sultan as emperor rather than to fluid concepts rooted in religion such as “the people of Muhammad,” “the banner of the Prophet,” and to the ruler as caliph, successor to the Prophet, as Ottoman rulers had represented themselves since 1519 when Selim I assumed this title upon his conquest of Egypt.

Going far beyond the Unionists, Atatürk abolished the office of caliph, exiling the members of the house of Ottoman abroad, closed the places of pilgrimage and dervish lodges, prohibited special religious dress to be worn outside the houses of worship and, much as two hundred years earlier Peter the Great had replaced the Patriarchate of Moscow with a Holy Synod in his new capital of St. Petersburg, Atatürk eventually abolished the ancient office of the Sheikh of Islam, replacing it with a Directorate of Religious Affairs.

(The sheikh had been a non-infallible pope who issued advisory decrees on matters of state policy as well as theology and morals. One of the last sheikhs, however, had had the poor judgment to condemn Atatürk to death in absentia for infidelity to Islam.)

The secular character of the republic was enshrined in the first as well as several subsequent articles of the 1924 Constitution and became one of the cornerstones of the ideology of the politically powerful army and the ruling Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican Peoples Party, RPP).

Secularism was emphasized even more, if such were possible, under the regime of Ismet Inönü (1884-1973). President from 1938 to 1950, he was a far less flamboyant personality who, not being popularly perceived as “shrouded in the mantle” of his great predecessor, may have felt that he needed to be “more royal than the king” in carrying out party policies.

When one speaks of secularism in Turkey today one thinks only of relations between the 98 percent Islamic majority and the state. As is well known, the several million Armenian and Greek Christians who had resided in the Ottoman Empire before the 1914-1918 war had dwindled to a few tens of thousands by the deportations of 1915 in the case of the Armenians and the 1920-22 war and 1926 exchange of populations in the case of the Greeks. Thus, initially, the shock of change from a theocracy to a secular system fell on what was then a predominantly illiterate, conservative Muslim majority.

The only major resistance to the demotion of Islam from the very reason for existence of the state to “a private matter of conscience,” whose limited manifestations were subject to regulation by a minor government directorate, was the rebellion of a number of Kurdish tribes under Sheikh Said in 1925. It was quickly and severely put down and, in any case, partook of as much a nationalistic as a religious character.

(The influence of a cleric of Kurdish origin, Sait-i Nursi (1876-1960), who preached more a moral renovation than a theocracy but was nevertheless subjected by the RPP regime to frequent arrest and retrial for his beliefs, is difficult to gauge on account of his rather underground character and the fact that Nursi never sought to establish a political party.)

While each and every government which followed Mustafa Kemal Atatürk adamantly proclaimed its adherence to Kemalism in general and secularism, as interpreted by him, in particular, after the introduction of multi-party democracy in 1950, many of the strictures were lifted against such religious practices as the pilgrimage to Mecca (formerly restricted supposedly to “protect the flow of hard currency”), the call to prayer in Arabic and religion classes. But many people wanted a still more pervasively Islamic nation and thus the predecessors of the Welfare Party came into being.

The history of the Welfare Party stretches back only to 1970 when Dr. Necmettin Erbakan, born in 1926 and educated as an engineer at Istanbul Technical University, appeared on the political scene. As president of the Turkish Union of Chambers of Commerce and Industry, he had spoken for small business, which he claimed was being subordinated by big capital and, especially, foreign interests under the aegis of then-Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel’s Justice Party.

As early as 1970 Erbakan had also begun to make pronouncements against not only Communism but also against the “infidel” West and “international Zionism.” The latter statements led opponents to charge him with “anti-Semitism,” an allegation which Erbakan and his subordinates have subsequently denied.

In 1970 Erbakan became an independent member of parliament for Konya Province. Konya city contained the tomb of Jelal ed-Din Rumi, preeminent mystic and founder of the “Whirling Dervishes,” and was the traditional stronghold of religious conservatives.

There Erbakan founded the National Order Party (NOP). This party was dissolved after the military ultimatum of March 12, 1971 which demanded, amongst other things “a strong Kemalist government.”

The NOP, however, was not singled out for closure, and not only was Erbakan not prosecuted but he was allowed to re-establish his party some 18 months later under the name of the National Salvation Party (NSP). At that time Erbakan was included in socialist Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit’s left-of-center government as vice-premier and minister of state.

This (first) somewhat surprising marriage of convenience apparently reflected the distrust of international finance and the West (i.e., the United States) the RPP leadership shared with Erbakan’s constituency. In 1977 he again participated in Demirel’s National Front coalition government.

On Sept. 12, 1980 a junta seized power in Ankara, dissolved parliament, closed all parties and announced the abrogation of parliamentary immunity, arresting a number of MPs, Erbakan among them. He was put on trial on charges of trying to illegally subvert the secularist tenets of the 1961 Constitution, but eventually he was declared not guilty. Some of his followers in the NSP were not so fortunate and were sentenced to various moderately long terms of prison (most had their terms shortened through amnesties) for the same offenses of which their leader had been absolved.

Erbakan’s Islamist party re-emerged for the third time in 1983 as the Welfare Party (WP), with Erbakan still precluded from open political activity but the eminence gris behind the scenes. At that time, however, Welfare only captured 4.5 percent of the vote. On Sept. 6, 1987 the Özal government introduced a referendum on whether or not the old politicians should be allowed to re-enter the party arena. The response was “yes,” but by a bare margin of less than one percent.

Compared to the extreme postures of some other political movements on the fringes of Turkish politics such as that of “Hoca” Kaplan, who posed as an Islamic “caliph,” making Khomeini-like broadcasts from Germany, or the illegal and shadowy Islami Büyük Dou Akinicilar (Raiders of the Great Islamic East), or even the fierce ultra-nationalism of the late Col. Alparslan Türkey’s Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (National Action Party, NAP), the WP may have sounded like the very voice of sweet reason. At any event, Prime Minister Tansu Çiller, beleaguered with threats of prosecution for irregular financial dealings in her and her husband’s extensive real estate empire, agreed in June of 1996 to form a coalition government with Erbakan as prime minister for the first two years. By then Welfare had already received 21.4 percent overall in the local elections held on March 27, 1994, making it the leading party in Turkey.

In June 1997, however, Erbakan stepped down from his partnership in the coalition government at the behest of the army, which accused the Welfarists of attempting to subvert the Kemalist secular order of the state and the Constitution. At the time, Welfare, having 150 members, was the largest party in the fragmented 550-seat National Assembly.

In August 1997, after a year of coalition rule, state prosecutors, acting at the behest of the army, petitioned the Constitutional Court to ban the WP on those same grounds: as subversive of the secularism mandated by the Constitution. Erbakan now appealed to public opinion in the West, which he had heretofore systematically attacked for its “freemasonry,” “moral degeneracy” and “Zionist conspiracies,” to support his party. He charged it was being banned not for any acts of corruption or terror, but solely for its ideological stances, a thing which, he pointed out, would not take place in any Western democracy.

Both Erbakan and the notables of the party were complacent, however, about the possibility of closure. According to a Reuters release dated Nov. 24, a “senior member” of the Welfare Party merely quipped that in the event of a dissolution verdict, “All that changes is the sign in front of the shop.”

The differences between Islamism as manifested in neighboring Muslim countries and Turkey are quite striking, as any Welfare partisan will quickly point out.

Although early on in the coalition Erbakan did anger the United States and some local politicians by conducting state visits to Libya and Iran, a lecture from Col. Muammar Qaddafi on Turkey’s dealing with the Kurdish problem and from Khameini and the mullahs of Tehran on their western neighbor’s handling of Islamic Holy Law questions, both gleefully broadcast by the opposition parties in the Turkish media, offended the nationalist sense of independence. They also served to discredit Erbakan to the public for not having contradicted his host leaders more sharply. Turks were and are nationalists first and foremost. It is that sense of nationalism that overrides the lure of pan-Islamism, which has fitfully co-existed with the ideology of Westernization on the one hand and pan-Turanism (or unification of all Turkic-speaking peoples) on the other. It ought not to be forgotten that Atatürk exiled the otherwise much respected author of the verses of the Turkish national anthem, Mehmet Akif, because of his support for pan-Islamism.

All this considered, it is not surprising that a sizable proportion of Turkey’s “silent majority” of Muslims who are drawn to a more orthodox practice of their faith demand to enter the Turkish Republic’s political garden, from which heretofore they have been largely excluded. This insistence will not be diminished by the action which Erbakan stated could not happen in a “Western democracy”—the ban of the Welfare Party handed down by the Constitutional Court on Jan. 16, 1998 together with the prohibition of political activity by Erbakan for five years and the institution of a major audit of party-related finances by the Department of Audit.

“Destur?”, that polite request to be included at the feast, may become more insistent. Only time will show whether the request will turn to strident demands approximating those heard in other nearby lands.

Louis Mitler is the owner of a translation agency, TRS Translation Services, in Washington, DC, specializing in the translation and interpretation of Turkish and Italian. He is a graduate of the Department of Literature [Belles Lettres] of the University of Istanbul where he spent six years and has served as cataloger/librarian for Turkish at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, and the Middle East Institute, Washington, DC.

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