Not the First Ban, Not the Last

Turkey has a long history of shutting down political parties. Twenty-four parties have been closed since 1962, when rules were tightened up following a military coup. But the AKP would be the first party ever to be shut while in government.

The party took office in 2002 and was re-elected last summer with an increased majority. The pro-Islamist Welfare party government - many of whose members later went on to form the AKP - also faced closure in 1997 but resigned first before ultimately being shut down by the courts.

Others parties closed down have included variations of socialist or communist groupings as well as pro-Kurdish separatist parties.

Under Turkey's 1982 constitution, which was framed after another military coup two years earlier, parties can be closed for opposition to democracy, opposing the unitary Turkish state or anti-secularism. The AKP allegedly falls into the last category, despite the party's denials.

Supporters claim that the country's secular or "Kemalist" establishment (named after Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded the secular Turkish Republic in 1923 following the demise of the Ottoman empire) has been gunning for the party because it views it as a threatening force, representing an emerging socially conservative middle class.

Hostilities first surfaced last year after the military opposed, unsuccessfully, the election of Abdullah Gül, a former foreign minister and AKP grandee, as Turkish president.

The intervention was justified on procedural grounds but many observers felt the real reason was Gül's Islamist background. His wife wears a headscarf.

Gül is one of the 71 party figures the chief prosecutor is seeking to ban from politics. His close ally and Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was previously jailed for four months after reciting an Islamist poem while he was mayor of Istanbul.

Erdogan recited: "The mosques are our barracks, the domes are our helmets, the minarets are our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers."