Erdogan, Recep Tayyip

born February 26, 1954, Rize, Turkey

Turkish politician, who became prime minister of Turkey in 2003.
In high school Erdogan became known as a fiery orator in the cause of political Islam. He later played on a professional football (soccer) team and attended Marmara University. During this time he met Necmettin Erbakan, a veteran Islamist politician, and Erdogan became active in parties led by Erbakan, despite a ban in Turkey on religiously based political parties. In 1994 Erdogan was elected mayor of Istanbul on the ticket of the Welfare Party. The election of the first-ever Islamist to the mayoralty shook the secularist establishment, but Erdogan proved to be a competent and canny manager. He yielded to protests against the building of a mosque in the city's central square but banned the sale of alcoholic beverages in city-owned cafés. In 1998 he was convicted for inciting religious hatred after reciting a poem that compared mosques to barracks, minarets to bayonets, and the faithful to an army. Sentenced to 10 months in prison, Erdogan resigned as mayor.
After serving four months of his sentence, Erdogan was released from prison in 1999, and he reentered politics. When Erbakan's Virtue Party was banned in 2001, Erdogan broke with Erbakan and helped form the Justice and Development Party. His party won the parliamentary elections in 2002, but Erdogan was legally barred from serving in parliament or as prime minister because of his 1998 conviction. A constitutional amendment in December 2002, however, effectively removed Erdogan's disqualification. On March 9, 2003, he won a by-election and days later was asked by President Ahmet Necdet Sezer to form a new government. Erdogan took office on May 14, 2003.
As prime minister, Erdogan toured the United States and Europe in order to dispel any fears that he held anti-Western biases and to advance Turkey's bid to join the European Union. Although the previous government had refused to allow U.S. troops to be stationed in Turkey during the Second Persian Gulf War, in October 2003 Erdogan secured approval for the dispatch of Turkish troops to help keep the peace in Iraq; Iraqi opposition to the plan, however, prevented such a deployment. In 2004 he sought to resolve the issue of Cyprus, which had been partitioned into Greek and Turkish sectors since a 1974 civil war. Erdogan supported a United Nation plan for the reunification of the island; in April 2004, Turkish Cypriots approved the referendum, but their Greek counterparts rejected it.