1UpInfo - A Portal with a Difference

Home     Contact Us    Disclaimer     Privacy     Links Directory

You are here >1UpInfo > Country Study & Country Guide > Turkey
 

-- Country Study & A Country Guide --

 


Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Afghanistan

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Albania

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Algeria

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Angola

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Armenia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Austria

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Azerbaijan

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Bahrain

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Bangladesh

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Belarus

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Belize

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Bhutan

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Bolivia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Brazil

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Bulgaria

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Cambodia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Chad

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Chile

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. China

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Colombia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Caribbean Islands

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Comoros

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Cyprus

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Czechoslovakia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Dominican Republic

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Ecuador

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Egypt

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. El Salvador

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Estonia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Ethiopia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Finland

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Georgia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Germany

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Germany (East)

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Ghana

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Guyana

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Haiti

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Honduras

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Hungary

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. India

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Indonesia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Iran

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Iraq

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Israel

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Cote d'Ivoire

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Japan

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Jordan

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Kazakhstan

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Kuwait

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Kyrgyzstan

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Latvia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Laos

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Lebanon

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Libya

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Lithuania

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Macau

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Madagascar

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Maldives

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Mauritania

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Mauritius

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Mexico

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Moldova

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Mongolia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Nepal

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Nicaragua

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Nigeria

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. North Korea

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Oman

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Pakistan

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Panama

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Paraguay

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Peru

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Philippines

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Poland

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Portugal

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Qatar

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Romania

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Russia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Saudi Arabia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Seychelles

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Singapore

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Somalia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. South Africa

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. South Korea

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Soviet Union [USSR]

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Spain

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Sri Lanka

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Sudan

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Syria

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Tajikistan

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Thailand

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Turkmenistan

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Turkey

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Uganda

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. United Arab Emirates

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Uruguay

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Uzbekistan

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Venezuela

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Vietnam

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Yugoslavia

Turkey - Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey. Zaire


Site Partners

1UpHealth.com
1UpTravel.com

Country Study & Country Guide for Turkey

Turkey

Section > Government and Politics

TURKEY'S POLITICAL SYSTEM faced four distinct but intertwined challenges in early 1995: accommodating the disaffected Kurdish ethnic minority; reconciling the growing differences, expressed with increasing stridency, between the secular elite and group s using traditional Islamic symbols to manifest their opposition to the political status quo; establishing firm civilian control over the military, which had a long history of intervening in the political process; and strengthening weak democratic practic es and institutions. Turkey displays the trappings of a Western-style democratic government: a legislature whose deputies are elected by secret ballot, multiple and competitive political parties, and relatively free news media. However, Turkey also is a c ountry where, on three occasions since 1960, military coups have overthrown elected civilian governments. The most recent military government, which seized power in September 1980, governed for three years. During the period of military rule, strict limit s were imposed on personal and political rights and liberties. Political parties were banned, and prominent civilian politicians were barred from participating in political activity for up to ten years. The military justified its intervention on the premi se that it was returning the country to the principles of Kemal Atatürk (see Atatürk and the Turkish Nation, ch. 1).

The supervised restoration of civilian rule began in November 1983 with National Assembly elections for which every candidate needed to obtain military approval. A civilian government with Turgut Özal as prime minister was formed after Özal's Motherla nd Party (Anavatan Partisi--ANAP) won a majority of the seats in the new assembly. Özal worked with the president, General Kenan Evren, a leader of the 1980 coup, to reestablish the primacy of civilian authority. By November 1987, martial law decrees had been repealed in most of Turkey except Istanbul and the predominantly Kurdish provinces of the southeast, and the military refrained from interfering in the selection of candidates for National Assembly and local elections.

The strengthening of democratic practices, however, was hindered by a lack of consensus within the political elite on the issue of granting cultural freedom and local government autonomy to the country's Kurdish minority. The Kurdish question began to reemerge in 1984 after the Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkere Kurdistan--PKK) initiated armed struggle against the state by attacking rural police posts in southeastern Turkey. The military's inability to suppress the militant PKK, combined with t he international media attention generated in 1988 by the arrival of tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurdish refugees fleeing chemical weapons attacks by their own government, made the Kurdish situation a leading topic of public discourse. Özal, whom the Natio nal Assembly elected president in 1989, became the first prominent politician to acknowledge openly that the Kurds were not merely "mountain Turks" but a separate ethnic group whose culture merited respect. Kurdish politicians opposed to the violent tacti cs and separatist ideology of the PKK responded by participating actively in the Social Democratic Party (Sosyal Demokrat Parti--Sodep) and the Social Democratic Populist Party (Sosyal Demokrat Halkçi Parti--SHP). Following the October 1991 National Assem bly elections, a group of SHP-aligned Kurdish deputies, who previously had formed the People's Labor Party (Halkin Emek Partisi--HEP) to promote the full equality of Kurds and Turks within Turkey, organized themselves as a separate parliamentary party. Ho wever, many Turkish leaders were unable to distinguish between a separate Kurdish political party and a Kurdish separatist movement, and they campaigned to have the HEP banned and its members arrested, even though HEP deputies enjoyed parliamentary immuni ty. In a severe blow to democratic procedures, seven Kurdish deputies were arrested in March 1994; they were sentenced to long prison terms in December after being convicted of "crimes against the state."

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the intensification of the PKK insurgency in southeastern Turkey tended to enhance the status of the military as the guardian of the country's territorial integrity and security. Consequently, Turkish politicians tended to treat the armed forces cautiously, apparently as part of a strategy to dissuade senior officers from initiating yet another coup. Civilian wariness was evident in the government's acquiescence to a number of extrajudicial measures that violated basic due process rights, for example, military censorship of news coverage of operations against the Kurdish guerrillas. In 1993 and 1994, scores of Turkish journalists whose reportage was perceived by the military as endangering state security were det ained for trials in special military courts. The military also forcibly deported more than 150,000 Kurds from some 850 villages in the southeast. Most of the evicted villagers subsequently resettled in the cities of western Turkey, where as many as one-ha lf of the country's Kurdish minority was estimated to be residing in 1994. The presence of so many Kurds in Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir, and other large cities has contributed to a transformation of the Kurdish situation from a regional problem to a national one, whose characteristics include increasing ethnic polarization between Kurds and Turks.

Another cause of polarization is the ideological competition between Turkey's elite, which is imbued with the secular philosophy of Atatürk, and a new generation of grassroots leaders, influenced by Islamic ideas. Islamic political activists began or ganizing in 1983, after the government authorized the formation of political parties, and subsequently founded the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi--RP; also seen as Prosperity Party). Its candidates competed in both national and local elections, campaigning in middle- and lower-class urban neighborhoods with a consistent message. They blamed the country's economic and political problems on the alleged indifference of secular leaders to Muslim values. The Welfare Party steadily increased its share of the popu lar vote, and won more than sixty seats out of a total of 450 in the 1991 National Assembly elections. In nationwide local elections held in March 1994, Welfare Party candidates won 19 percent of the total vote, placing the party third behind the ruling T rue Path Party (Dogru Yol Partisi--DYP) of President Süleyman Demirel and Prime Minister Tansu Çiller and the main opposition Motherland Party. The Welfare Party's electoral successes included winning the mayor's office in Ankara, Istanbul, and twenty-sev en other major cities, as well as in 400 smaller municipalities, including almost all the towns in the Kurdish provinces of the southeast.

In early 1995, Turkey was still in the process of trying to redefine its regional foreign policy in the wake of the two major international developments on its borders during 1991: the Persian Gulf War fought by the United States-led international co alition against Iraq and the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union. Turkey's de facto participation in the Persian Gulf War--Ankara permitted United States aircraft to use a Turkish air base for bombing missions over Iraq--helped to strengthen ties with the United States, a fellow member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO--see Glossary). However, the aftermath of that same war--hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds trying to flee into Turkey following the collapse of their uprising against t he Iraqi government--was one of the factors that contributed to the intensification of the Kurdish problem within Turkey. The military efforts to suppress the PKK and the political efforts to silence Kurdish political leaders prompted international human rights organizations to accuse the Turkish government of systematic human rights violations. These charges complicated relations with the European Union (EU--see Glossary), an economic organization that Turkey aspired to join as a full member, because sev eral EU countries opposed Turkish membership on grounds that the country's practice of democracy fell short of EU standards. In addition, Turkey and its neighbor Greece, an EU state and a member of NATO, had failed to resolve their dispute over the status of Cyprus and their conflicting offshore claims in the Aegean Sea.

The consequences of the Soviet Union's dissolution potentially are more promising for Turkish diplomacy than the consequences of the Persian Gulf War. The fifteen countries that replaced the Soviet Union include five Asian states whose peoples speak T urkic languages. Özal and his successor as president, Demirel, promoted Turkey as a political and economic model for these Turkic-speaking countries. In keeping with this role, they sought to expand Turkey's influence through numerous bilateral agreements pertaining to cultural and economic relations. However, the long-term success of Turkey's efforts is not assured because both Iran and Russia are trying to extend or maintain their respective influence in Azerbaijan and Central Asia. Initially, Turkish l eaders seemed to welcome the prospect of competition with Iran for influence in the region, and they confidently asserted the superiority of their secular state over Iran's Islamic model. By the end of 1993, however, Turkey--perhaps out of concern about R ussian intentions--began to stress the need to work with Iran through multilateral regional arrangements such as the Economic Cooperation Organization.

Data as of January 1995

Turkey - TABLE OF CONTENTS


Go Up - Top of Page


Print this Page

Content on this web site is provided for informational purposes only. We accept no responsibility for any loss, injury or inconvenience sustained by any person resulting from information published on this site. We encourage you to verify any critical information with the relevant authorities.

Information Courtesy: The Library of Congress - Country Studies

Home     Contact Us    Disclaimer     Privacy     Links Directory

©1UpInfo All Rights reserved. Site best viewed in 800 x 600 resolution.