Turkey: The prosecutor who has filed a lawsuit against the AK Parti (Justice and Development Party) of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gül, in an attempt to get the court to close down the party, compares the AKP to fascist parties in the past in his indictment and says that it’s clear that the real goal of the party is to make Sharia the law of the land.

For those who are wondering about this issue: the prosecutor – Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya – is Turkey’s top prosecutor. This isn’t some small case, filed by some wacko; this is a very serious case, instigated by a very serious man. It’s a clear sign that Turkey’s Kemalists are worried tremendously by the AKP and especially the reforms it has passed through Parliament in recent months.

It’s perfectly clear, and it has always been clear to me, that the AKP is a party of radicals, who want to force people to live according to their strict and backwards view on Islam.

The indictment also says: “The AKP is founded by a group that drew lessons from the closure of earlier Islamic parties’ and uses democracy to reach its goal, which is installing Shariah in Turkey.” What the prosecutor is trying to say with this is that the AKP’s goal is to overthrow Republicanism and to get rid of secularism.

“There is an attempt to expunge the secular principles of the Constitution. The guiding principle of political Islam is Shariah (Islamic) law,” the indictment says. Therefore, political Islam (at least as preached by the AKP) is “inconsistent with the principles of a democratic state.”

In the indictment Yalçınkaya “cited several incidents as evidence of the AKP’s Islamist motives.” For instance: “Party leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and other party members targeted the Republic and its revolutions in their criticisms, and argued that ‘sovereignty did not belong to people but to God, secularism would be cast aside if people desire to do so, secularism was anti-religionist,’ during their membership in parties before 2001.”

Of course there are also certain practices of the party which give the real goals and convictions of the AKP away: “Women and men sitting separately in party meetings, participating en masse at funerals of religious order sheikhs, mayors visiting mosques to assume the role of imams during Ramadan, abstaining from shaking women’s hands, are mundane practices of the party members.”

And for those who wonder whether the AKP isn’t very similar to Christian Democratic parties in (the rest of) Europe, Yalçınkaya explains:

The indictment drew a clear line between Turkey’s Islamic parties’ view of a state from that of European Christian Democrats. “Political Islam in Turkey is not limited to the will to regulate relations between the individual and God, it claims the right to regulate state and societal order,” read Yalçınkaya’s indictment. Political Islam’s basic tent is the Shariah, it said and noted that Shariah, with its acceptance of its rules as the will of God, is considered incontestable. “That is why political Islam and its constitution, Shariah, is not democratic, but totalitarian,” it said.

The Turkish constitution, then, allows people to found parties but also allows judges to close such parties down if the parties’ ideologies are in breach with the Turkish constitution. “Closure is foreseen for parties who deny secularism, the base of libertarian democratic order. This sanction and ban is legal just like the ban on Nazi’s and the Fascist Party in Italy, considering the threat the secular order faces,”  Yalçınkaya’s indictment says.

He also argues in his indictment that if necessary, the AKP is willing to use violence to accomplish its goal of implementing Sharia. “Preferring the option of Jihad, thus violence, is a possibility,” the prosecutor said in the indictment.