


Three weeks after Turkey’s constitutional court announced its decision to ban the Refah Party and Necmettin Erbakan for being too Islamic, publication of the verdict and its reasons in the official gazette are still awaited.
Turkey’s secular fundamentalist establishment struck the country’s Islamic movement another blow on January 16, when the Supreme Court voted by 9-2 to ban the Refah Party for being Islamic and to banish the Party’s leader...
Two senior Islamic activists in Turkey were given long jail sentences by an Ankara state security court on October 15, on trumped up charges. Nuruddin Sirin, editor of the Islamic daily Selam, was jailed for 17-and-a-half years, and Bekir Yildiz, a former mayor of Ankara’s Sincan district...
The expression, the ‘terrible Turk’ is clearly racist but a case can be made for applying it to Turkey’s generals. Since Necmettin Erbakan of the Refah Party became prime minister exactly a year ago, his generals have gone berserk.