ANKARA: A leading Turkish general issued a stinging attack on the centre-right government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan by warning that the danger of Islamism in the country was reaching “alarming” levels.

Defying EU demands for the military to keep out of politics, General Ilker Basbug, chief of land forces, warned the Erdogan government that the top brass still saw itself as the ultimate arbiter of Turkey’s secularist constitution.

“The Turkish armed forces have always taken sides and will continue to do so in protecting the national state, the unitary state and the secular state,” he told a ceremony for cadets at a military academy in Ankara. Islamists were “patiently and systematically” seeking to erode the secularist order.

The robust defence of the military’s role in Turkish politics is certain to affect an EU assessment of Turkey’s bid to eventually join the EU.

The European Commission is to issue a report card on Turkey in November, delayed from next month, and is concerned about curbs on freedom of expression, persecution of the large Kurdish minority and the military’s interference in democratic politics, as well as Turkey’s dispute with the EU members Greece and Cyprus over trade.

Other incidents on Wednesday showed Turkey ignoring EU criticism, suggesting a rise in hostility ahead of elections next year. Prosecutors filed new charges against the Turkish Armenian editor Hrant Dink for “denigrating Turkishness”, an article in the penal code used to muzzle writers and journalists and which Brussels wants scrapped.

In the largest Kurdish city in Turkey, Diyarbakir, the state put 56 Kurdish mayors on trial for appealing to Denmark to allow a Kurdish exile television station to keep broadcasting.—-Dawn/The Guardian News Service