Tansu Çiller (Turkish: [ˈtɑnsu ˈtʃilːɛɾ]; born 24 May 1946) is a Turkish academic, economist, and politician who served as the 22nd prime minister of Turkey from 1993 to 1996. She is Turkey's only female prime minister. As the leader of the True Path Party, she went on to concurrently serve as Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey and as minister of foreign affairs between 1996 and 1997.
As a professor of economics, Çiller was appointed Minister of State for the economy by Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel in 1991. When Demirel was elected as President in 1993, Çiller succeeded him as leader of the True Path Party and prime minister. Her premiership presided over the intensifying armed conflict between the Turkish Armed Forces and the PKK, resulting in Çiller's enacting reforms to national defense. Her government was able to persuade the United States and the European Union to register the PKK as a terrorist organization.
Shortly after winning the 1994 local elections, large-scale capital flight due to the lack of confidence in Çiller's budget deficit targets led to the Turkish lira and foreign currency reserves' almost collapsing. Amid the subsequent economic crisis and austerity measures, her government signed the EU-Turkey Customs Union in 1995. Her government was alleged to have supported the 1995 Azeri coup d'état attempt and presided over an escalation of tensions with Greece after claiming sovereignty over the Imia/Kardak islets.
Although the DYP came third in the 1995 general election, she remained prime minister until she formed a coalition government with Necmettin Erbakan in 1996. The Susurluk scandal that year revealed the relations between illegal organisations and Çiller's government. Revelations that she had employed individuals connected with the Turkish mafia and the Grey Wolves such as Abdullah Çatlı led to a decline in her approval ratings. Erbakan's and Çiller's government fell when tensions with the military, concerned with civilians' lack of commitment to secularism, boiled over. This coup d'état by military memorandum was the fourth in the republic's history. DYP declined further in the 1999 general election. Despite coming third in the 2002 general election, Çiller's DYP won less than 10% of the vote and thus lost all parliamentary representation, which led to her resignation as party leader and departure from active politics.
Background and academic career
Tansu Çiller was born in Istanbul; she was the only child of her father Necati Çiller, a journalist and governor of Bilecik Province during the 1950s, and Muazzez Çiller, a Rumelian Turk from Thessaloniki.
Çiller graduated from the department of Economics at Robert College Yüksek Kısım after completing her high school education at the American College for Girls in Istanbul. After graduating from Robert College, she continued her studies in the United States, where she earned graduate degrees from the University of New Hampshire and University of Connecticut with her husband Özer Uçuran, whom she married in 1963. She later completed her postdoctoral studies at Yale University.
Çiller taught economics at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In 1978, she became a lecturer at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and in 1983 she was appointed as professor by the same institution. She was also president of the now-defunct Istanbul Bank.
In addition to her job at Boğaziçi, Çiller made a name for herself with her studies at TÜSİAD and her critical reports of the Motherland Party's (ANAP) economic policies. For a brief period she was a consultant to Bedrettin Dalan, then Mayor of Istanbul. In December of the same year, she was elected to the administrative board of the other major center-right party, the True Path Party (DYP) and became the deputy president responsible for the economy. Çiller entered parliament as a deputy from Istanbul in the 1991 election. Çiller took credit for some DYP slogans for the election, such as "two keys", but also generated controversy with the economic program called UDİDEM, which was not implemented by the government. DYP won the election, and formed a coalition government with the Social Democrat Populist Party (SHP). Çiller was appointed as a minister of state responsible for the economy by Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel. She was elected to the executive board of DYP and acquired the position of deputy chair.
After the death in office of President Turgut Özal (which according to some was part of an alleged military coup), Prime Minister Demirel won the 1993 presidential election. Suddenly the important position as prime minister and leader of the DYP was vacant. The party found itself in a leadership crisis. Çiller was no obvious candidate, but her three challengers could not muster the political capital to compete effectively. The media and business community supported her, and her gender gave the impression that Turkey was a progressive Muslim country. She fell 11 votes shy of a majority in the first ballot for party leader. Her opponents withdrew and Çiller became the party's leader and on 25 June, the first and so far only female Prime Minister of Turkey. She continued the DYP-SHP coalition with small changes (50th government of Turkey).
During her tenure as prime minister, an Islamist mob set fire to a hotel which was hosting an Alevi cultural event, killing 35 and wounding many others. The Sivas massacre and the government's slow response foreshadowed Çiller's future handling of human rights.
Çiller chose to continue Demirel's coalition government with the SHP, but replaced most of the ministers from her own party. She was the only woman in cabinet until 1995, when a woman state minister for women and family affairs was appointed. As Prime Minister Çiller promoted a pro-military conservative populism and economic liberalism. She shifted the DYP more to the right compared to her mentor Demirel. She juggled "masculine" and "feminine" styles, boasting of her "toughness" at the same time as she wanted to be the nation's mother and sister. She became a new role model for women politicians, though was accused of being authoritarian. Çiller appeared uninterested in women's issues.
Çiller played a major role in reforming Turkey's economic institutions, which are known as the 5 April Decisions and was rewarded with IMF funding.
Her premiership preceded over the intensifying armed conflict between the Turkish Armed Forces and the PKK, resulting in Çiller's enacting numerous reforms to national defense and implementing the Castle Plan. The Castle Plan (previously approved by the National Security Council) was implemented to combat the PKK (although elements of the strategy preceded the official plan). Çiller transformed the Turkish Army from an organization using vintage equipment from the US Army into a modern fighting force capable of countering the PKK which used guerilla warfare and hit-and-run tactics. With a better equipped military, Çiller's government was able to persuade the United States and the European Union to register the PKK as a terrorist organization. However, Çiller was responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated against the Kurdish people by the Turkish military, security forces, and paramilitary. Several reports of international organizations of human rights documented destroying and burning Kurdish villages and towns and extrajudicial killings of Kurdish civilians perpetrated by the Turkish military during Çiller's government of 1993–1996.
Her overall approach to the Kurds was ambiguous, while she suggested for the Kurds an autonomy similar the one the Basques have in Spain, she retracted her statement upon pressure from the Turkish military.
She declared in October 1993: "We know the list of businessmen and artists subjected to racketeering by the PKK and we shall be bringing their members to account." Beginning on 14 January 1994, almost a hundred people were kidnapped by commandos wearing uniforms and traveling in police vehicles and then killed somewhere along the road from Ankara to Istanbul. Abdullah Çatlı, a leader of the ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves and an organized crime figure, demanded money from people who were on "Çiller’s list", promising to get their names removed. One of his victims, Behçet Cantürk, was to pay ten million dollars, to which Casino King Ömer Lütfü Topal added a further seventeen million. However, after receiving the money, he then went on to have them kidnapped and killed, and sometimes tortured beforehand.