Kurdistan Observer

Turkey's Supreme Elections Board (YSK) on Friday disqualified popular former Istanbul Mayor Tayyip Erdogan, former Islamist prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, pro-Kurdish leader Murat Bozlak and leading human rights activist Akin Bordal as candidates in the upcoming November 3 elections ending days of suspense.

The board decided that the four could not be candidates according to the strict sedation laws of Turkey.

Court sources told the Turkish Daily News that according to article 76 of the Constitution the four had committed crimes against the state that barred them from becoming candidates. The court course also said article 11 of the elections law ruled that even if a person is pardoned for committing a crime under article 312 of the penal code which deals with sedition he or she cannot become a candidate.

Erdogan is the chairman of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) which is running way ahead of all the other parties in the public opinion polls. If he had been permitted to run in the elections he was slated to become Turkey's next prime minister.

Erbakan, is the former prime minister who was toppled in 1997 after a military led campaign. His Welfare Party was closed by the Constitutional Court and later Erbakan was banned for five years. Later he was also convicted on Islamic sedition charges. Bozlak was the chairman of the pro-Kurdish People's Democracy Party (HADEP) which is expected to win landslide victories in many southeastern provinces.

Akin Birdal is the former president of the Turkish Human Rights Association who survived an assassination attempt in the hands of ultranationalist militants. Both Bordal and Bozlan have convictions on sedition charges.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan said this week he would fight on with his Ak Party even if the board barred him from Parliament.

Abdullah Gul, the deputy chairman of the AK Party who is regarded as leading candidate to become prime minister in the absence of Erdogan if the party wins in the elections told TDN after hearing the verdict of the board "this is a blow to our democracy. Turkey has pushed itself into a tight corner. It's image has bene hurt."

He said the verdict shows that Turkey "is not so free after all" and added "this resembles the days when politicians were being vetoed. " He was recalling the vetoes of the military administration prior to the 1983 elevations when Turkey returned to semi-civilian rule after the 1980 coup. The military has disqualified three major parties and dozens of candidates prior to the elections.

"How will they carry Turkey into the European Union with such bans?" asked Gul.

The AKP, drawing on anger over economic hardship, is far ahead of squabbling mainstream parties that struggle in surveys to garner the 10 percent needed to enter parliament.

The gap may well narrow in six weeks, but a one-party AKP government cannot be ruled out. Markets appear less fearful of religious tenets invading politics than of AKP's inexperience in government compromising a $16 billion IMF crisis pact.

Erdogan, who served four months of a 10-month sentence for sedition in 1999, has done everything he can to make his peace with the "Deep State" -- a nebulous coalition of interests embracing the army, establishment politicians and judiciary.

He is very aware of the suspicions of a staunchly secularist army that led a powerful pressure campaign in 1997 to drive from power Turkey's first Islamist-led government of Erbakan. He denies the party is Islamist and takes extra care to prevent his supporters from displaying any kind of Islamic reflexes.

Erdogan received a 1998 conviction for publicly reading a poem including the lines: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers..."

The article 312 of the penal code under which he was convicted has been changed as part of a package of rights reforms passed in pursuit of Turkey's EU membership ambitions. But the court disregarded the reforms.