Thousands pay final homage to former Turkish PM Ecevit
By Christopher Luke,WNS Turkey Correspondent
ANKARA - Tens of thousands have thronged the streets of Ankara for a final farewell to former prime minister Bulent Ecevit, widely admired here for a five-decade political career of unblemished honesty, but best remembered for ordering Turkish troops to Cyprus in 1974. An estimated 20,000 people were packed into the courtyard of the Kocatepe Mosque, Ankara's biggest, and tens of thousands more were in the surrounding streets Saturday, closed to traffic for the day.
The crowd briefly broke into boos and pro-secular chants of protest as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and ministers of his Islamist-rooted government arrived at the mosque where Turkey's entire political class, from President Ahmet Necdet Sezer on down were gathered. Present also were former presidents Suleyman Demirel, Ecevit's arch-rival for four decades, and Kenan Evren, the former general who seized power in a 1980 coup and sent both Ecevit and Demirel to jail. Turkish Cyprus' former and current presidents, Rauf Denktas and Mehmet Ali Talat, attended in memory of the 1974 invasion of Cyprus that Ecevit ordered in response to a coup by ultranationalist Greek Cypriots aiming to unite the island with Greece.
After the ceremony at the mosque, Ecevit was to be buried with full state honours at the national cemetery in a western Ankara suburb. Parliament enacted a special law this week to allow the ceremony, normally reserved for former heads of state, to be held for the five-time former premier. Early Saturday, in the first of several ceremonies, Ecevit's body was sent off with military honours from the GATA military medical academy hospital where he died last weekend at 81 after a five-and-a-half-month coma caused by a cerebral haemorrhage.
posted by wnsworld @ 11:08 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home