Turkish Court Jails Islamic Actor for Play

ANKARA, Turkey —  A Turkish court on Tuesday sentenced an Islamic playwright and actor to 24 years in jail for a play that allegedly insulted the country’s powerful armed forces, Anatolian news agency said.

It said the Ankara court found Mehmet Vahi Yazar guilty of “provoking hatred by highlighting class, racial or religious differences between people” in his play, “An Enemy of God.”

Four other members of the cast received 16 years in prison on the same charge, often used to prosecute Islamic politicians or journalists.

A performance of the play last year in the northeastern city of Erzurum outraged secular authorities.

They said the drama encouraged revolt by portraying the military as an obstacle to the establishment of a state based on Islamic Sharia law.

Turkey’s armed forces have inspired a judicial crackdown on political Islam since forcing the collapse of modern Turkey’s first Islamic-led government last year.

The generals say it is their duty to protect overwhelmingly Muslim Turkey’s secularist constitution.

Turkish state religious authorities are to take control of about 180 privately run mosques as part of a new anti-Islamic law demanded by the military, the agency said.

Secularists accuse private mosques of being centers of religious activism aimed against the state.

“There are 180 mosques owned by individuals or organizations. These shall be brought under the control of the department of religious affairs within three months,” the agency quoted the department head, Mehmet Nuri Yilmaz, as saying.

The secularist coalition of Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz--no relation--passed the law in parliament shortly before it broke up for a two-month summer recess last week.

The move against unregistered mosques was part of a raft of legislation demanded by Turkey’s generals to clamp down on Islamists.

The current government was pressed to get tougher on Islamists after the military top brass accused it of going soft on Islamic activism earlier this year.

Meanwhile in Istanbul, a Turkish court imprisoned a pro-Kurdish newspaper cartoonist for more than three years for insulting the country in drawings published in two now-defunct dailies, journalists said Tuesday.

They said cartoonist Dogan Guzel was jailed Monday for “insulting and degrading” the Turkish republic.

The Ulkede Gundem paper said the court had objected to Guzel’s frequent use of a slang swear word in a cartoon strip he drew for two Kurdish papers.