Turkey's Hard-core Prosecutor

When the office of President was about to be occupied by Muslim Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül a national crisis erupted. The Chief of the General Staff threatened with a military intervention and departing President Sezer quickly appointed a new Chief Prosecutor from his party at the climax of the conflict in May 2007: Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, a public prosecutor who has managed to provoke an even greater national crisis during his brief one-year term.

By bringing charges against the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) to the Constitutional Court of Turkey, demanding that the party be closed and its officials barred from politics, Yalcinkaya has mobilized the judicial system against the government, the president, and the parliament at the same time. Who is this man and what is driving him to launch such a judicial coup?

The nationalist Kemalist social class

Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya represents the long-antiquated Turkish state. An official of the Turkish state bureaucracy who stands for the nationalist Kemalist social class, an elite class and generation that sees itself along with the military as guarantor and protector of the secular republic and that will use every means possible to cling to its accustomed power structure and privileged position.

Thus Yalcinkaya as Chief Prosecutor embodies not only the Kemalist state ideology, but is also stepping forward as a kind of inquisitor who must protect the republic from the Islamic threat. The charge demanding that the ruling AKP party be banned from politics for five years shows how very convinced the 58-year-old career judge is of this.

Of course, banning parties is nothing new in Turkey. This tradition has been practiced since 1963, and twenty-four parties have been banned to date. But for the first time the ban targets a ruling party, and one with a 47 percent majority behind it. Nonetheless the petition for a ban did not come as a surprise to many in the country.

The judge, known in the Turkish press as cold-blooded, rigorous, and hardworking, has spent the past five years collecting and analyzing everything in preparation for an AKP ban. When the headscarf ban was abolished at universities, the time had come to submit the petition to ban the AKP.

A family that turned to Kemalism

Yalcinkaya was born in 1950 as the son of a Kurdish-Turkish family in Urfa, one of Turkey's most ancient cities located near the Syrian border with a high illiteracy rate. The family had a good reputation there. His grandfather was a well-known sheikh and belonged to the Islamic Nakshibendi order.

More formative, however, was the upbringing he received from his father. A teacher, he taught him the secular ideals of Atatürk and sent him away from the religious conservative village Kara as a boy to attend school in the capital. Thus he came from a family that turned to Kemalism.

​​In Ankara he studied law and soon entered a career as a judge while left-wing and right-wing student groups were fighting each other and the military seized power for the third time on September 12, 1980. At the age of 30 Yalcinkaya had experienced with great awareness at least two of the three military putsches (1960, 1971, 1980). Thus he is not only an exemplary product of the Kemalist school but also a child of the putsches.

The fervent Kemalist, who became a judge at the highest Turkish court of appeals (Yargitay) in 1998 and was appointed deputy chief prosecutor in 2004, carefully prepared the 162-page petition. After all, many founding members of the AKP started their political careers in the banned Islamic Welfare Party (Refah, 1998) and Virtue Party (Fazilet, 2001). But even critics of the AKP do not find his charge of Islamism substantive enough and suggest he is settling a personal score with the AKP.

Incorruptible and stiff-necked

Yalcinkaya, however, had already distinguished himself in November 2007 with the petition to ban the Pro-Kurdish Party DTP with its 20 delegates in parliament, an application that is still pending in the constitutional court. He has also made a name for himself as one of the most vehement opponents of the constitutional draft passed by the AKP to reform the headscarf ban at universities. Yet party politics and party bans are not his real areas of specialty as a public prosecutor, rather fighting corruption.

Even though the graying man with strikingly serious face does not shy away from conflicts and is personally upright and incorruptible because he is convinced that he and his likeminded peers are the true champions of the republic, critics point out that on purely formalist grounds he alone had to submit the petition to ban the AKP as a representative of the shrinking nationalist Kemalist upper class. After all, today neither the military nor the Kemalist power elite have a majority in the population.

But before the Kemalists surrender their power, they are ready to fight out of desperation for "their" secularism, even if this would push the country toward political turmoil and into a very dangerous situation.

Semiran Kaya

© Qantara.de 2008

Translated from the German by Nancy Joyce

Qantara.de

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