Word: seculare
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...nomination of Abdullah Gul for President has renewed concerns that Turkey could be plunged back into the political crisis that triggered early parliamentary elections last month. That crisis pitched the ruling conservative AK Party led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan against the staunchly secular military, which rejected the nomination of Gul, the foreign minister, for the largely ceremonial presidency. The military opposed Gul's initial candidacy on the grounds that it represented a violation of Turkey's founding secularist principles - the fact that Gul's wife, a conservative Muslim, wears a headscarf in public represented a symbol of the Turkish state...
...what they have come to expect from their politicians. Some of the most prominent Iraqi politicians spend little time in the country, much less in parliament. Egregious absenteeism cuts across sectarian and ethnic lines: perennial no-shows include Shi'ite elder Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Sunni leader Saleh Mutlak and secular stalwarts Iyad Allawi and Adnan Pachachi. (Al-Jaafari and Allawi, both former Prime Ministers, are trying to unseat the incumbent, Nouri al-Maliki.) "There's no point in going to parliament," Allawi told TIME recently. "Nothing important is done there anyway...
...resignations of Sunni and secular members of his cabinet only confirm what Iraqis have known for months, but the Bush Administration has steadfastly refused to acknowledge: that Maliki is himself a hindrance to national reconciliation. Even his severest critics in Washington seem to think Maliki is guilty only of incompetence - that he lacks the political skills to bring together Iraq's warring communities. But it's not that he can't reach out to the Sunnis: he just...
...policies that, far from healing the country's sectarian wounds, have often aggravated them. While Maliki has himself been careful to act the conciliator, especially in conversations with President Bush and American politicians visiting Baghdad, his aides have repeatedly ridiculed and humiliated Sunni leaders, and ignored the advice of secular politicians...
...Prime Minister and his coterie. A faction of his own Dawa Party, led by his predecessor Ibrahim al-Jaafari, has begun quietly to seek a new Shi'ite-Kurdish alliance that would eject Maliki. And another former prime minister, Iyad Allawi, is trying to cobble together a secular-Sunni alliance that would put Allawi back...