Turkey Government

A week after Turkey's government collapsed, the president asked a center-left political veteran to form a new administration. Ex-Premier Bulent Ecevit, 73, who leads the fourth-largest party in parliament, would head Turkey's fifth government since 1995, which will face the prospect of being dissolved after parliamentary elections in less than five months.

BEIRUT - Fierce fighting was reported in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on Tuesday as rebels said their forces were pushing toward the center of the nation's business and financial hub. In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton predicted that opposition gains would result in a rebel "safe haven" being secured in Syria. And there were unconfirmed reports in Arab-language news media that Syria's ambassador to Cyprus had defected, becoming the latest official to abandon President Bashar Assad's regime.

President Suleyman Demirel on Friday asked a secular opposition leader backed by the armed forces to form Turkey's new government, ending an Islamic party's bid to stay in power until new elections. Mesut Yilmaz, 50, the dour, chain-smoking leader of the center-right Motherland Party, said he expects to form a government by June 30. But his prospects for assembling a parliamentary majority and ending the nation's political crisis are uncertain.

What is an Islamist foreign policy, exactly? Is it identifying with Muslims and their suffering, or is it identifying with anti-Western regimes even at the cost of Muslims' best interests? Turkey's foreign policy under the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, government demonstrates that far from protecting Muslims and their interests, it is the promotion of a la carte morals -- bashing the West and supporting anti-Western regimes, even when the latter hurts Muslims. AKP leader and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is scheduled to meet today with President Obama in Washington.

The Clinton administration has warned Turkey's military leaders that the United States will not support a coup against the country's Islamist-led government, officials said Friday. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said any changes in Turkey's government should occur "within a democratic context and with no extra-constitutional approach." A White House official put the message more bluntly, saying: "No coups."

When Apostolos Daniilides, an ethnic Greek, decided to become an Orthodox priest 26 years ago, he set off for the only Christian theological university in Muslim Turkey. Perched on a pine-forested hill on a tiny island off the coast of Istanbul, the Halki Theological University has trained generations of Orthodox clergy and every ecumenical Orthodox patriarch who has led the world's 270 million Orthodox Christians.

Millions gathered at mosques across Turkey on Friday to offer solemn funeral prayers for the more than 13,000 killed by last week's earthquake, and the government acknowledged that the number of people left homeless could top half a million. As the scope of the housing crisis became clear, the government moved to assert greater authority in coping with quake-related emergencies.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) was a distinguished soldier and reformer; the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey. Militarily, he was perhaps most famous as the Ottoman officer who inflicted two defeats on British forces at Gallipoli during World War I. Later, however, he set about ridding his country of some of the corruption, superstition and waste that had corroded the empire from within.

The government of conservative Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz collapsed Wednesday after losing a no-confidence vote in parliament, plunging the country into a fresh period of political uncertainty. Yilmaz's minority coalition with leftist leader Bulent Ecevit fell after lawmakers voted 314-214 against it. Shortly after the vote, Yilmaz submitted his formal resignation to President Suleyman Demirel. Yilmaz will remain in office as caretaker premier until a new government is formed.

Long suppressed by Turkey's secular government, Islamic activists are looking for political opportunity in a growing public outcry over the state's bungled handling of earthquake relief. Well-organized activists from the Virtue Party, the main Islamic political group, and from a variety of Muslim aid agencies mobilized from the first hours after the Aug. 17 quake. They provided comfort and assistance to victims while the government relief efforts were slow to get going.

Turkey's top court ruled Thursday that Islamic head scarves violate secularism and cannot be allowed at universities, deepening a divide between the country's Islamic-oriented government and secular institutions. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government had tried to allow the scarves at universities as a matter of personal and religious freedom. But the Constitutional Court said the constitutional amendments passed by Parliament in February went against secularism.

Nestled beneath snowcapped mountains along the border with Iran, this area wrapped around a vast lake and brimming with archeological treasures is among Turkey's best-kept secrets. So why not open a hotel here for adventurous travelers, tour operator Victor Bedoian from Arizona wondered during a visit in 1998. After several years of meticulous planning and plenty of encouragement from the Turkish government, Bedoian did just that in March 2001.

Fatma Sener has everything to live for. She is smart, attractive, good at sports and has an outgoing personality. But doctors say the 22-year-old will almost certainly die if she sticks to her current diet. Sener has been surviving on sugar, salt and water for 164 days.

The Turkish currency lost more than 40% of its value Thursday after a political and financial crisis brought on by tumbling stock prices forced the government to abandon exchange controls. Turkey's second financial crisis in three months has sent the stock market tumbling, weakened the government of this key U.S. ally in the Middle East and sent jitters through emerging markets from Russia to Brazil.

Turkey said early today it was abandoning its controlled currency program, allowing the lira to float in a dramatic bid to curb a financial crisis racking the country. The move, after 12 hours of emergency talks, all but spelled the end of a three-year program launched amid high hopes in January 2000, and dealt a heavy blow to Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit. Inevitable devaluation may bring some social hardship.

The head of Turkey's National Intelligence Agency, or MIN, said in remarks published Tuesday that it would be against Turkish interests to hang Kurdish rebel chief Abdullah Ocalan, who was sentenced to death last year for treason. In an unprecedented briefing with selected national newspapers, Senkal Atasagun also said he is in favor of ending a ban on Kurdish-language broadcasting and of setting up a state-controlled television channel in Kurdish.

Few people go to Sarajevo to get away from it all, but Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller's recent solidarity visit to the embattled Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina must have seemed almost a relief after a disastrous January that has almost derailed her 7-month-old premiership.

After 70 years of suppression in modern Turkey, political and revolutionary ferment is sweeping the nation's 12 million Kurds. A perilous, sometimes violent celebration of Kurdish identity rocks their homeland here in southeastern Turkey and poses a new challenge to stability in the volatile Middle East. Formulating policies to confront Kurdish nationalism will be an early and major test of a new Turkish government being assembled by Suleyman Demirel, winner of last Sunday's national elections.

Revelations that a top army general authorized a smear campaign against politicians, journalists and human rights activists have intensified debate in Turkey over the role of the military and have further undermined this nation's already shaky democracy.

A court acquitted Turkish journalist Nadire Mater, who was charged with insulting the military in her banned book on the Kurdish rebel war. The case was seen as a test of Turkey's pledge to improve its poor human rights record. Mater faced up to 12 years in prison if convicted. Unless the prosecutor appeals the verdict, the ban on "Mehmet's Book," which recounts the horrors and frustrations of recruits fighting Kurdish rebels, will be lifted in seven days.