ISTANBUL: Turkey’s former president and prime minister Suleyman Demirel, a political giant who survived two military coups and a ban on holding office, died on Wednesday. He was 90.
His heyday was during one of the most chaotic periods of modern Turkish history when governments changed sometimes annually under the shadow of the powerful military, and the country was beset by daily street violence and an economic slump.
He died of heart failure resulting from a respiratory tract infection, the state Anatolia news agency said, quoting the private Ankara hospital where he was treated.
Mr Demirel served as prime minister on repeated occasions in the 1960s and 1970s and then again one final time in the 1990s before serving as head of state from 1993 to 2000.
In all, he was prime minister of seven different governments, serving five separate stints in the post.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a statement that Mr Demirel had left “deep marks on Turkish political history” with his contribution to the country’s development.
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu declared three days of national mourning for Mr Demirel, with a state funeral ceremony to take place in Ankara on Friday and the burial of his body in his home Isparta region on Saturday.
Trained as an engineer, Mr Demirel first went into politics in the early 1960s in the wake of the 1960 military coup that resulted in the execution of then premier Adnan Menderes.
Leading the centre-right Justice Party (AP), he was first elected prime minister in 1965, becoming at 40 Turkey’s youngest government chief.
He held together a government for some six years, a huge achievement by the standards of the time. But Mr Demirel resigned in the 1971 coup, which became known as the “coup by memorandum” when the army presented him with a written ultimatum rather than sending tanks onto the streets.
The coup in 1980, the third in the history of the Turkish republic, saw Mr Demirel hit with a ban from all political activity for 10 years and sent into temporary internal exile at a military camp.
Published in Dawn, June 18th, 2015
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