Turkish PM rebuffs army

Erdogan defends school reforms, Parliament to rule on key bill

By Gareth Jones - Reuters

ANKARA - Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed yesterday to push a controversial higher education bill through Parliament in a direct challenge to Turkey’s powerful military establishment.

The fiercely secularist General Staff, backed by opposition lawmakers and university rectors, says the draft plan to ease curbs on students entering university from religious vocational schools will boost the influence of Islam in education.

The government denies the bill threatens Turkey’s secular order and says it has a mandate from voters to overhaul higher education structures dating back to a 1980 military coup.

“The Parliament will go through with the democratic and legal process on the (higher education) draft law,” Erdogan told a gathering of his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), deeply distrusted by the military because of its Islamist roots.

To loud applause from AKP lawmakers, Erdogan made clear he believed the General Staff had no business becoming involved in political decision-making. “A social consensus is not a consensus between institutions but of the nation,” he said.

The government is expected to use its large parliamentary majority to push the bill through the assembly later this week.

Turkish commentators have suggested the government secretly hopes the secular-minded President Ahmet Necdet Sezer will defuse the row by vetoing the draft bill. Under this scenario, Erdogan would then quietly put the draft on ice.

“This would allow the AKP to tell its supporters, ‘You see, we did what we could, but the secular establishment blocked us,’” said one Ankara-based Western diplomat.

“But this is still a highly risky strategy because the damage will already have been done, in terms of increased tensions with the army and the rest of the secularist establishment and also to Turkey’s image in the European Union.”

“The AKP have raised the stakes... This is one of the biggest tests of what they actually want to be — a populist party playing to their conservative grassroots or a genuinely liberal, pro-EU party,” the diplomat said.

Sedat Ergin, a columnist for the top-selling Hurriyet newspaper, echoed those concerns.

“The stubbornness of the AKP in granting privileges to the (religious vocational) schools arouses suspicion even among those who try not to be biased against them,” he wrote.