Thousands of Turks chanted in defence of secularism on Saturday as they buried veteran leader Bulent Ecevit, best known for winning EU candidacy for Turkey and invading Cyprus in a five-decade political career.
Crowds keen to protect Turkey's official secularism booed Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan - whose party's roots are in political Islam - as he arrived at the state funeral in Ankara. "Turkey is secular and will remain secular," chanted members of the crowd, which a police official estimated at 50-80,000. Witnesses put the figure much higher.
Mainly Muslim Turkey is officially secular but defenders of secularism suspect the AK Party government of having a hidden Islamist agenda. Secularists also demonstrated last Saturday, and in May some 25,000 marched in defence of secularism at the funeral of a judge shot dead by a suspected gunman.
Ecevit, who attended that funeral, said earlier this year that the government posed a threat to the secular order. Secularists concerned that Erdogan may run for president - which he has not ruled out - shouted: "Cankaya (the presidential palace) is secular and will remain secular!"
"As everyone knows there are some signs of reactionary (Islamist) efforts at the moment. How risky this is hard to say ... but as we can see today, the people are the guarantors of secularism," Mahmut Topcu, a contractor from Ankara and member of Ecevit's old party, told Reuters. Erdogan, addressing a party conference later, reiterated he was committed to a secular system.
Supporters of Ecevit, the former prime minister who had a stroke in May and died on Sunday aged 81, carried and pinned to their coats pictures of the leftist nationalist politician. Some cried, while hundreds threw flowers, waved flags, and chanted: "Ecevit, man of the people."
White doves, the symbol of Ecevit's Democratic Left Party (DSP), flew overhead while giant pictures of the politician, who quit the DSP's leadership in 2004, hung across the city. The funeral was attended by unionists, miners, members of the cabinet, former presidents - including one who interned Ecevit after a 1980 military coup - and the leader and former leader of the Ankara-backed enclave in northern Cyprus.
Ecevit was best known outside Turkey for ordering the invasion of Cyprus in 1974, after a Greek Cypriot coup backed by the military junta then ruling Greece. At home, the invasion won him the title "Hero of Cyprus". He won European Union candidacy for Turkey in 1999. Ecevit also presided over a deep financial crisis in 2001.
Born in Istanbul on May 28, 1925, Ecevit was educated at London and Harvard universities. Before entering parliament in 1957, he was known as a writer and poet, translating T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound into Turkish. He also studied Sanskrit.
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