KurdistanObserver.com
Rooting For The Islamists
Latimes
July 24, 2007
Western observers may fear political parties with Islamist roots, but Turkey’s
is committed to legal reform, EU membership and economic growth.
Western observers tend to regard the political success of Islamists in the
Middle East as bad news, because elections have brought to power such dangerous
hard-liners as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hamas leader Ismail
Haniyeh. Yet the strong victory of the main Islamist party in Sunday's election
in Turkey -- the world's prime laboratory for an experiment in whether Islam is
compatible with democracy -- was a very hopeful development.
The ruling Justice and Development Party, known in Turkey as the AKP, won a
thumping 47% of the vote in the parliamentary contest. It was a repudiation of
the secular establishment that ruled Turkey off and on for decades after being
put in place by Kemal Ataturk in 1923. This elite, which runs the judiciary and
the military, threatened to undermine the country's democracy in April, when
army leaders hinted that they would stage a coup if an AKP candidate whose wife
wears a head scarf were elevated to the presidency.
In Turkey it's the Islamists, or at least the liberal Islamists who head the AKP,
who promote religious freedom and tolerance, while secularists' fears of a
religious takeover of government institutions have prompted hysteria over
matters as seemingly harmless as a scarf. The AKP's popularity is soaring
because of measures that have tamed inflation and led to strong economic growth
in just six years, and its support of Turkish efforts to become a member of the
European Union has produced progressive legal reforms. Meanwhile, the
nationalistic
Republican People's Party, the party of Ataturk, opposes EU membership and
favors military intervention in Iraq to discourage attacks from Kurdish
separatists.
It's still unclear whether Turkey's version of tolerant and moderate Islamic
rule will spread to other Muslim countries, or even survive for long in Turkey.
But at this point, it's a beacon for struggling democracies in places such as
Iraq and Afghanistan, which is why it's in the overwhelming interest of the
United States and Europe to support the newly strengthened regime of Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. For the U.S., that means a renewed push to
resolve the Kurdish problem diplomatically. For the EU, it means fighting to
keep Turkey's membership drive alive.
