Turkey's Parliament OKs Measure Against
Pro-Kurdish Party
ANKARA (AP)-May 10, 2007-Turkey's Parliament
Thursday approved a measure that would make it harder for a pro-Kurdish party to
organize politically by fielding its candidates as independents in general
elections.
Parliament said the measure was designed to
simplify the voting process, but it came after a legal Kurdish party announced a
plan to circumvent a 10% threshold required for parties to win seats in
Parliament. The plan was to field candidates as independents who would then form
a party once they took up their individual posts as lawmakers.
The measure needs the approval of President
Ahmet Necdet Sezer to go into effect. Sezer, a close ally of the military whose
office is viewed as the protector of national unity, was likely to approve it.
The move comes despite the European Union's
call on Turkey to reduce the threshold and ensure wider representation in
parliament.
Kurdish politicians elected to the Parliament
would have a higher political profile to push for cultural, social and economic
rights for the country's Kurds, who are not recognized as an official minority.
Turkey has been fighting a separatist Kurdish
guerrilla movement in a war that has killed tens of thousands since 1984.
Several predecessors of the Kurdish party have been shut down for alleged ties
to Kurdish guerrillas.
The Kurdish party won 6.2% of the national vote
in the last elections, held in 2002. The party now says it hopes to win around
30 seats if independent candidates are elected to the Parliament.
The measure proposed by Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party amended the electoral law and
scrapped the right of independent candidates to have separate ballot papers from
those used to choose candidates running for elections under party lists.
Previously, the independent candidates could
stand outside polling stations and hand over ballot papers with their names
already inscribed to voters, giving them a slight advantage over the political
parties' candidates.
Literacy is low and some people don't speak
Turkish in the relatively poor, Kurdish-dominated southeast. Voters in the past
had found it easier to pop an independent candidate's ballot paper into the
envelope than to select a candidate from a long, complicated ballot paper
listing all of the parties.
