Turkey Gov't Buckles, But Stands

Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit on Monday crushed an opposition attempt to topple him and stifled efforts led by the Islamist Virtue Party to delay April elections.

But the dramatic announcement of a legal move to ban Virtue, the largest group in parliament, could herald a spring of high political tension in Turkey.

A prosecutor who applied to the chief prosecutor's office on Monday to ban Virtue accused party supporters of aiming to set up a state based on Islamist principles.

Ecevit's victory in a censure motion ended 10 days of parliamentary drama.

Stocks edged up after the vote on hopes a strong government, including Ecevit, would be returned to conduct vital economic reforms.

"It happened as we expected," said Mesut Yilmaz, former prime minister and head of the Motherland Party, which is widely expected to form a government alliance with Ecevit's Democratic Left Party.

"This shows the anti-election front has been smothered."

A total of 236 deputies voted for the censure motion, well short of the 276 needed to topple Ecevit.

Ecevit was further buoyed later when a British television watchdog ordered a 21-day broadcast ban on Kurdish Med TV channel, against which Turkey had launched a diplomatic offensive in recent weeks.

Ankara argues the channel, broadcast from Britain, is a mouthpiece for the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and has been used to call for attacks on Turkish soil.

Parliament's speaker also refused to allow debate of a Virtue-backed motion to delay polls. He referred it to a parliamentary commission, where it probably will die before Turks vote on April 18.

Virtue leaders were apparently using the censure vote and the motion to delay polls as a lever to win repeal of laws under which leading Islamists had been prosecuted and former Islamist leader Necmettin Erbakan banned from politics for five years.

Top Turkish General Huseyin Kivrikoglu had warned members of parliament last week that a delay in polls would lead to chaos. He also said that a bid to repeal laws cited by Virtue would be unacceptable.

The army, which sees itself as guardian of the country's secularist order, edged an Islamist-led government from power in 1997. Since then, it has backed a crackdown on Islamist leaders.

Chief prosecutor Vural Savas, who imposed a ban on Virtue's predecessor, Welfare, in 1998, must now decide whether to refer Virtue to the constitutional court.

Savas has suggested at times that Virtue, despite its more moderate image, is little more than a reincarnation of the banned Welfare Party.

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