ANKARA, Turkey - A Turkish court on Thursday ordered a popular pro-Islamic politician to stand trial on charges of insulting the military and praising Islamic groups in Afghanistan in a speech he made a decade ago.
Judge Ramazan Aksan however, rejected a petition by prosecutor Nuh Mete Yuksel to jail Recep Tayyip Erdogan — the former mayor of Istanbul and one of Turkey's most popular politicians — until his trial begins. No trial date has been set. Yuksel said he would likely appeal the decision not to arrest Erdogan.
The court decision comes a day after the country's powerful military petitioned the Justice Ministry to bring charges against Erdogan.
Yuksel questioned Erdogan for 45 minutes Thursday and then ordered him to appear before a judge who would rule if the pro-Islamic leader should be jailed pending trial.
Yuksel called on the judge to arrest Erdogan on charges of insulting the military and inciting hatred based on religion in a speech he made in the Black Sea city of Rize in 1992. The speech was aired on a TV station last week.
Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country but the state is fiercely secular and speaking out against secularism is a crime. Insulting the military is also a crime.
In his 1992 speech, Erdogan congratulated Afghanistan for forming an Islamic republic.
He also accused the influential military of sending inexperienced conscripts to battle Kurdish rebels in the country's predominantly Kurdish southeast. Some 37,000 people, mostly rebels and civilians, have died in the fighting.
In a written statement delivered to prosecutors Thursday, Erdogan said he accepted that his remarks of a decade earlier were "harsh," and said he had no quarrel with Turkey's armed forces, the semi-official Anatolia news agency reported.
But Erdogan rejected the charges against him, saying that other political leaders had made similar comments at the time, and adding that "the right to criticize is important in a democracy," Anatolia said.
The charismatic politician is no stranger to legal woes. He was convicted and served a four-month prison sentence in 1999, when he was the mayor of Istanbul, for reading a poem the courts said incited hatred based on religious differences.
Erdogan founded the Justice and Development Party last summer after a court closed an earlier pro-Islamic party for anti-secular activities. The party is the second largest opposition party in parliament.