Turkey's veteran ex-PM Ecevit dies aged 81

ANKARA, Nov 6 (Reuters) Former Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, who sent troops into Cyprus in 1974 and won European Union candidate status for his country in 1999, died yesterday aged 81, Anatolian state news agency said.

Ecevit, a leftist nationalist and poetry lover whose political career spanned half a century, suffered a stroke on May 18 after attending the funeral of a top judge slain by an suspected Islamist gunman. Ecevit had been in a coma ever since.

With his trademark cap, indigo blue shirts and clipped moustache, the softly-spoken Ecevit was widely respected in Turkey for his old world courtesy and his personal integrity and modesty in a political culture plagued by corruption.

Feisty to the end, he told the English-language New Anatolian newspaper earlier this year that Turkey's current ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has Islamist roots, posed a threat to the country's secular order.

''I believe our regime is under serious threat,'' he said.

Ecevit said Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's government bore some responsibility for the shooting of the judge in an Ankara courtroom by a man reportedly protesting over Turkey's ban on the Islamic headscarf in public offices.

''The government openly encouraged those terrorists (by also supporting an easing of the headscarf ban)... The unfortunate attack is proof that Turkey will face a very serious situation unless the government changes its mentality,'' Ecevit said.

Ecevit's three-party coalition lost power to Erdogan's AKP in a November 2002 general election following a devastating financial crisis that wiped out 10 per cent of Turkey's economy.

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

''He was acting as if he were still living in the 1970s or 1980s,'' commentator Mehmet Ali Birand said of Ecevit.

Ecevit, who was interned for months after a 1980 military coup and banned from politics for years, finally quit the leadership of his Democratic Left Party in 2004.

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

In his New Anatolian interview, Ecevit made clear he had no regrets about Cyprus, saying the island was better off divided.

Despite his firmly-held principles, Ecevit was also a pragmatist who knew how to cut deals with his opponents.

The committed leftist -- he always rejected the label ''socialist'' -- struck a deal with the International Monetary Fund to fight inflation and introduce radical market reforms in an economy long dominated by the state.

Ecevit also 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.

Born in Istanbul on May 28, 1925, Ecevit was educated at London and Harvard universities. Before entering parliament in 1957, he was known as a writer and poet, translating T S Eliot and Ezra Pound into Turkish. He also studied Sanskrit.

Reuters SBA VP0425