ANKARA - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday blasted moves by a chief prosecutor to have his ruling AKP party banned for anti-secularism, saying this went against the people's will.
The president of the Constitutional Court announced Friday that its chief prosecutor of appeals, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, had sought a ban on the AKP for allegedly breaching the country's secular system.
Yalcinkaya not only urged that AKP be banned, but that 71 people including Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul be barred from political activity.
During a tour of the Kurdish-dominated southeast, Erdogan said the initiative "ignores the will of the people" who came out strongly in favour of the AKP in the last legislative elections.
He slammed it as "anti-democratic," and said "nobody has the right to give the impression that Turkey is a third-class nation."
According to media reports, Yalcinkaya criticised the AKP for seeking to transform Turkey into an Islamist state and for undermining democracy.
"The moderate Islamic model proposed for Turkey aims to establish a state governed under Sharia law and to come to this means by terrorism if necessary," said the prosecutor.
The court is set to meet Monday to decide whether to accept Yalcinkaya's complaint.
The constitutional court has in the past banned several Islamist parties, among them the Welfare Party of Turkey's first Islamist prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, who used to be Erdogan's mentor.
Once the AKP has been officially notified of any closure demand, it will have a month to prepare its preliminary defence arguments.
The outcome could play a role in Turkey's bid to join the European Union. EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn had earlier warned Turkish courts not to interfere in democracy.
Secularists have accused AKP of planning to introduce religious rule to the mainly Muslim country, while the party itself says it is in fact committed to secularism.
The secularists' arguments against AKP were given ammunition last month when the party pushed through a parliamentary reform allowing women to wear the Islamic headscarf in universities.
BA/cld/ach
03/16/2008 20:11 GMT