Reuter on political crisis in Turke

[kurdeng at aps.nl]

Subject: Reuter on political crisis in Turkey


By Firat Kayakiran

ANKARA, Sept 30 (Reuter) - Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, foiled in her
efforts to form a conservative coalition, said on Saturday she would keep
searching for a government and would decide soon on a replacement for her
collapsed coalition.

"We are going to keep going with this business," she told reporters. "We will
not leave this country without a government -- you will see in the coming
days."

A spokesman from Ciller's True Path Party (DYP) said earlier Ciller was likely
to make an annoucement on a new government following a meeting of her party
executive. But Ciller did not mention early elections, and reporters' questions
to other party officials were unanswered.

Instead, she vowed to press on with her key aims of customs union with the
European Union, privatisation and a trans-Turkey Caspian oil pipeline. She also
pledged to keep up Turkey's fight against an 11-year Kurdish separatist
insurgency in the southeast, which has claimed more than 18,000 lives. "We will
never give up on customs union and we will never give up on terror," Ciller
said.

A top DYP official said earlier Ciller was considering putting forward general
polls after her failure to form a government to replace her right-left
coalition that folded 10 days ago when Ciller resigned over a dispute with the
new chief of her social-democrat parners. "If the barriers before Turkey's
progress will be removed with the DYP going for elections, then we are ready
for elections," Yasar Dedelek, a DYP deputy chairman, was quoted by the
semi-official Anatolian news agency as saying. He said elections may not be
ready from a technical point of view for the December date demanded by the
opposition, but could be held in the spring.

Ciller has been loath to hold polls ahead of schedule in October 1996, but
after the failure of a long-awaited alliance with the fellow conservative main
opposition party on Wednesday, her options have been narrowed.

Officials from Ciller's DYP and her former social democrat partners said on
Friday that the two parties may re-join in a new coalition, but Ciller has not
approached the social democrats for talks so far. Ciller wants to delay
elections as much as possible so she can push ahead with her own policy agenda.
She has been seeking the support of a patchwork of small parties from both ends
of the political spectrum for a minority government, but this option is also
fraught with difficulties and some politicians have publicly withdrawn their
support.

Any new government will have to deal with Turkey's biggest strike of more than
250,000 public workers, which is well into its second week, as well as a mass
of legislation for customs union and difficult democracy reforms.

The strike suffered a first major setback on Friday when textile workers slated
to join the fight over pay instead agreed to binding arbitration, the Turk-Is
labour confederation said. But Turk-Is said the rest of the strikers would stay
off the job until the government boosts a pay rise offer of an average 5.4
percent for 1995 when inflation is biled to be 70 percent.

President Suleyman Demirel asked Ciller to form a new government last week, but
talks for a long-awaited conservative alliance with the opposition Motherland
Party (ANAP) broke down on Wednesday in a bitter dispute between the party
chiefs.

(3)

ISTANBUL, Sept 29 (Reuter) - Striking Turkish public sector workers faced their
first defeat on Friday when textile workers slated to join the fight for higher
pay instead agreed to binding arbitration, the Turk-Is labour confederation
said.

"This is a matter of life and death and the textile workers betrayed us,"
Yildirim Koc, adviser to the president of Turk-Is, told Reuters. But Turk-Is
said the defection of the 16,800 textile workers -- a total of 260,000 people
are now on strike -- would not weaken resolve to stay off the job until the
government boosts its pay hike offer of an average 5.4 percent for the year
when inflation is slated to hit 70 percent.

Turk-Is has been a strong opponent of binding arbitration for the public sector
workers, arguing the process is inherently unfair because unions have a
minority representation on the arbitration board.

"Our only trouble has been with the textile workers, the other strikes are
doing well, especially disrupting the paper and sugar industries and the
loading docks," he said.

Bulgaria's railway chairman said the strike had stopped incoming trains for
three days, and Turk-Is said maintenance workers in various regions of Turkey
were blocking tracks to keep trains from running.

The nationwide strike by some 260,000 workers - the number will rise to almost
400,000 by mid-October - comes as Prime Minister Tansu Ciller is unsuccessfully
trying to form a new coalition to replace the one that broke down last week.

The strike will be one of the more pressing issues facing any new government,
and Turk-Is is already flexing its muscles, warning would-be partners not to
concede on the pay rise issue. The trade unions called the strike September 20
to force Ankara, which is trying to stick to an International Monetary
Fund-backed austerity programme, to match pay rises to Turkey's spiralling
inflation.

(4)

SOFIA, Sept 29 (Reuter) - A strike by Turkish railway workers has blocked
trains from entering the country from Bulgaria for three days, Bulgaria's
railways chairman said on Friday. Rail traffic is queued up at the border
because of the strike, Turkey's biggest, over pay demands.

"For three days passenger and freight trains have not been allowed to enter
Turkey except for a single train loaded with livestock," railways' chairman
Anguel Dimitrov told Reuters. "This morning we have 56 freight trains blocked
at the border," he added.

Dimitrov declined to give any figures of losses by the Bulgarian railways
before the strike ended. He said Turkish authorities would be charged with the
losses under the international rules.

An official at the Kapitan Andreevo checkpoint on the Turkish border, the only
crossing between the two countries, said there were no jams in road traffic.
"It's quiet here, we are having routine traffic," she said by telephone.

However, passengers are forced to seek free seats in buses heading to Turkey
from Kapitan Andreevo, a tourist said.

ISTANBUL, Sept 29 (Reuter) - Leftist urban guerrillas shot dead two Turkish
sentries at Istanbul's gendarmerie headquarters, Anatolian news agency said on
Friday.

Members of the extreme-left Revolutionary People's Liberation Party - Front
(DHKP-C) shot one of the sentries as he guarded the entrance to the complex in
Maslak district on Thursday night, it said.

The other chased the attackers and was later found in the street with a bullet
wound in the neck. He died in hospital.

Anatolian quoted a senior gendarme officer as saying the DHKP-C had taken
responsibility for the attack. He said it was an apparent act of revenge for
the deaths of at least three leftists prisoners in a jail riot in Izmir last
week.

At least three police officers have been killed in Istanbul and more than a
dozen wounded this year in attacks blamed on leftist urban guerrilla groups or
Kurdish militants.

DHKP-C is an offshoot of the now defunct Dev Sol (Revolutionary Left) group
which killed dozens of Turkish military and civilian officials as well as
Western businessmen and military personnel serving in Turkey in the 1970s and
'80s. Dev Sol has split into two rivals factions in recent years.

Leftist protesters took 28 people hostage at the Istanbul bar association on
Thursday but freed them unharmed a few hours later following a standoff with
Turkish police.


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 * Origin: APS Amsterdam (aps.nl), bbs +31-20-6842147 (16:31/2.0)