Turkish Leader Wins Vote Of Confidence

Prime Minister Tansu Ciller won a broad vote of confidence in her new coalition government Sunday, ending six weeks of political crisis.

The Parliament voted 243-171 to accept the reformed government made up of Ciller’s conservative True Path Party and Deniz Baykal’s socialist Republican People’s Party. The right-wing National Action Party also backed the coalition.

“Ciller and Baykal make a good marriage,” said a senior Western diplomat in the Turkish capital, Ankara. “We’re pretty positive about what’s been going on. They accomplished a lot of things before the vote of confidence. Turkey is finding its real self.”

The nail-biting crisis that has unraveled since the previous coalition collapsed Sept. 20 almost toppled Ciller, 49, a U.S.-educated professor of economics who entered politics only in 1991.

Ironically, however, the last two weeks have seen the passage of more significant pieces of legislation than in the preceding four years. Laws on patents, copyrights, and broader human rights have been pushed through the Parliament.

Much of the work is angled to obtain the European Parliament’s approval of a vital customs union. The United States and major European Union governments strongly back the deal to bind this country of 65 million people to the Western system. But European lawmakers have demanded more reforms in Turkish human rights.

“I said we’d do the best we could do. It is not a cosmetic change. We will see many people in prison liberated according to the change in the law,” Ciller said last week.

More than 150 people are incarcerated under laws limiting freedom of expression in Turkey, most convicted of alleged support for Kurdish separatism. The Foreign Ministry says more than 25 people have already walked free since the government retroactively softened a notorious article of Turkey’s anti-terrorism law on Oct. 26.