Turkey mourns veteran ex-PM Ecevit, dead at 81

ANKARA, Nov 6 (Reuters) Turkish leaders paid tribute today to former prime minister Bulent Ecevit who has died aged 81 after a colourful political career that spanned half a century.

Ecevit, who sent troops into Cyprus in 1974 and won European Union candidate status for his country in 1999, suffered a stroke on May 18 and had been in a coma in hospital ever since.

The hospital said in a statement he passed away yesterday evening after a deterioration in his breathing and circulation. He will receive a state funeral on Wednesday.

Today's newspapers carried front-page pictures of Ecevit in happier days, wearing his trademark cap and with a white dove, symbol of his Democratic Left Party (DSP), perched on his hand, flanked by his devoted wife and fellow leftist Rahsan.

Tributes poured in from politicians across the spectrum.

''I am very saddened to hear about the death of Bulent Ecevit who as a politician and statesman made an important contribution to our country. Turkish political life has lost an important personality,'' Prime Minster Tayyip Erdogan said in a statement.

President Ahmet Necdet Sezer also praised Ecevit's career.

''We have lost Ecevit,'' mourned the leftist Cumhuriyet newspaper, describing him as a ''romantic knight''.

''A dove has flown away,'' said Hurriyet, referring to the symbol of the DSP that lost power to Erdogan in 2002.

Politicians and ordinary citizens flocked to the Ankara hospital where he died to pen messages in a book of condolences.

INTEGRITY The softly-spoken Ecevit, a leftist nationalist and poetry lover, was widely respected in Turkey for his old world courtesy and his personal integrity and modesty in a political culture plagued by corruption.

Columnist Oktay Eksi wrote in Hurriyet that Ecevit had left behind an untarnished name.

''He gave the greatest examples of never diverging from his struggle even in the most hopeless conditions. He has departed after earning the title of the last statesman produced by our country,'' Eksi said.

As prime minister, Ecevit is best known outside Turkey for ordering the invasion of Cyprus in 1974 after a Greek Cypriot coup engineered by the military junta then ruling rival Greece.

That won him plaudits at home as the ''Hero of Cyprus'', though the island remains divided and the Turkish Cypriots' enclave in the north is recognised only by Ankara.

Ecevit's three-party coalition lost power to Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) in a November 2002 general election following a devastating financial crisis that wiped out 10 percent of Turkey's economy.

The increasingly infirm Ecevit was partly blamed for the meltdown after he argued with President Sezer and publicly declared a ''serious state crisis''. His words sent already edgy markets tumbling and triggered the worst recession for decades.

Interned for months after a 1980 military coup and banned from politics for years, he quit the DSP leadership in 2004.

Feisty to the end, he told the English-language New Anatolian newspaper earlier this year that Erdogan's AKP, which has Islamist roots, posed a threat to Turkey's secular order.

Despite his firmly-held principles, Ecevit was also a pragmatist and dropped his long-standing suspicion of the EU, winning Turkey the candidacy it had sought for decades at a Helsinki summit in 1999. Ankara began its EU talks last October after several waves of human rights reforms initiated by Ecevit.

REUTERS SP BST1512