Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Back to the Brink in Turkey? - Yahoo! News

"Back to the Brink in Turkey? By ANDREW PURVIS Wed Aug 15, 5:45 AM ET The re-nomination of Abdullah Gul for President has renewed concerns that Turkey could be plunged back into the political crisis that triggered early parliamentary elections last month. That crisis pitched the ruling conservative AK Party led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan against the staunchly secular military, which rejected the nomination of Gul, the foreign minister, for the largely ceremonial presidency. The staunchly secular military opposed Gul's initial candidacy on the grounds that it represented a violation of Turkey's founding secularist principles - the fact that Gul's wife, a conservative Muslim, wears a headscarf in public represented a symbol of the Turkish state intolerable to the generals."

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