Turkey's Judicial Coup D'etat.(World View)(banning of Justice and Development Party)

This battle could last for months longer, and whether the AKP wins or loses, the consequences are bad.

Turkey is at war with itself again, over religion and politics in Turkish life, and the consequences for both itself and its friends could be devastating. Last month, the nation's chief prosecutor prepared an indictment of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) for allegedly violating the Constitution's principle of secularism. The indictment, triggered by the AKP's decision to remove constitutional provisions prohibiting wearing headscarves in universities, seeks literally to abolish the party. It also demands that 71 AKP officials, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, be banned from politics for five years.

Erdogan clearly erred by suddenly ramming the headscarf liberalization through Parliament. But the banning of a ruling party--one that has been in power for over five years, and quite successfully at that--is unprecedented in the modern West. The AKP won overwhelmingly in parliamentary elections last July, and this kind of politics makes a mockery of the democratic process. Though it is legal to pursue such a case, it is, to many Turks, quite simply a judicial coup. Yet last week Turkey's Constitutional Court agreed to hear the case, jeopardizing the country's political and economic stability, already suffering from world market pressures. This battle could last for months, its outcome is uncertain and its consequences, whether the AKP wins or loses, would be bad. So Turkey's principal international partners, the United States and the European Union, are watching with consternation--and their fingers crossed. At the most fundamental level, the case renders the stability of Turkey uncertain. More immediately, Washington needs Turkey's cooperation for its plans for Iraq and particularly for keeping Iraqi Kurdistan stable. Political instability is likely to prevent the Turkish government from making progress on its other major domestic headache, the Kurdish question, and on knotty foreign-policy priorities important to the United States and the EU, such as cooperation on Iran and resolving the longstanding Cyprus problem. Moreover, a ban of the AKP will undermine Turkey's chances for EU accession.

So far, EU leaders have shown no reluctance to make this clear to Turkey. The United States is in a tougher position. In the past, Washington has shown only tepid disapproval of extraconstitutional attempts to bring down the AKP government. This time it has publicly criticized the court, but Washington's words carry little weight with tough-minded secularists in the judiciary, media and military on this issue. Nor, to the surprise of Turks, does the United ...