By Xinhua
Ankara : Ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party Chairman and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday the closure case was a move against national will, not against AK Party, the semi-official Anatolia news agency reported.
Chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya filed a lawsuit to close the AK Party Friday, saying “the party has become the focal point of anti-secular activities.”
“We are a political party struggling for democracy,” Erdogan was quoted as saying at his party meeting in southeastern province of Siirt.
“Nobody can say that AK Party, who won the votes of 16.5 million people, is the hotbed of anti-secularism,” Erdogan said.
“We have to make this clear. Yesterday’s development is not a step taken against AK Party. It is a step taken against national will,” he added.
Yalcinkaya demanded that 71 executives of the party, including President Abdullah Gul, Erdogan and former parliament speaker Bulent Arinc be banned from politics for five years.
Yalcinkaya underlined Erdogan’s speech in Spain at the alliance of civilizations summit to the effect that “no ban could be imposed on political symbols,” advocating entry of Islamic headscarf to universities. Prosecutor asserted that symbols explicitly representing allegiance to a religious belief swill break up public order.
A recent government attempt to lift a decades-old ban on wearing the Islamic headscarf in universities again prompted the opposition to accuse the government of having Islamist motives.
Erdogan, like many others in his party, were involved in Turkeys political Islam movement and was jailed in the past for reciting, at a political rally, a poem a court deemed to be inciting religious hatred.
Yalcinkaya’s reasons for demand to the Constitutional Court for AK Party’s closure are similar to ones that led disbanding of Turkey’s former Islamic parties, like Welfare Party (RP) and Virtue Party.