Amnesty Bill Adds to Turks’ Outrage : Europe: Proposal to free prisoners draws fire before veto, which may be overridden. Public is already furious over slow response to earthquake.

ANKARA, Turkey —  Roundly criticized for its sluggish response to the devastating Aug. 17 earthquake in northwestern Turkey, Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit’s coalition government is facing further public fury over a controversial amnesty bill that would free thousands of murderers, mobsters and crooked politicians but keep political prisoners behind bars.

Encouraged by the nation’s usually pro-establishment media, Turks have been bombarding the prime minister and President Suleyman Demirel with faxes, letters and telephone calls protesting the bill, which was approved Saturday by parliament.

Under mounting public pressure, Demirel on Wednesday refused to sign the amnesty law and sent it back to parliament for review, in effect vetoing the measure.

“The bill,” Demirel said, “contradicts the principles of equality laid out in the constitution . . . and appears to discriminate in favor of criminal gangs.”

Under Turkish law, the 550-member parliament can override a presidential veto with a two-thirds majority.

The bill, passed after a stormy 20-hour parliamentary debate, addresses crimes committed before April 23. It would free 26,538 inmates within a month and reduce the sentences of 31,980 others to ease pressure on the country’s crowded prisons. However, about 10,000 political prisoners--most of them Kurdish dissidents and Islamic militants--would remain in jail.

Questioned about the veto, Ecevit said Thursday: “My party [of the Democratic Left] had planned this to be a humane law, but it got changed in the parliamentary commission.”

Two well-placed Turkish officials who requested anonymity said the government will seek to push the bill through when parliament reconvenes Oct. 1. They said the measure probably will be amended, though they would not say how.

Mesut Yilmaz, leader of the conservative Motherland Party in the ruling tripartite coalition that took power in June, insisted that “the consequences of repealing the law would be far graver than enacting it.”

Yilmaz stepped down as prime minister last year amid allegations that he had used his influence to help enrich business cronies. He and scores of bureaucrats facing investigation over past abuses of power would be pardoned if the bill becomes law in its present form.

So too would contractors convicted of “causing death through negligence,” a charge that, among other things, covers those who built and sold shoddy housing that collapsed and killed hundreds in previous earthquakes. Contractors convicted in the future on any charges resulting from last month’s quake would not be eligible. The official death toll from the Aug. 17 quake reached 14,691 on Thursday.

Convicted murderers and torturers would receive reduced sentences under the amnesty law and could be eligible for release based on time already served.

Crimes that would be fully pardoned under the law range from the mundane, such as “lying under oath,” to the outright bizarre: “making a woman belly dance in order to encourage prostitution.”

“The logic underpinning the choice between those that will be pardoned and those that will not is impossible to discern,” said a senior Western diplomat who requested anonymity. “What is clear is that public faith in this government has been reduced to zero.”

As details of the amnesty became public this week, even Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk conceded, “I too find some of the contents indigestible.”

“It’s an absolute scandal,” said Yavuz Onen, chairman of Turkey’s Human Rights Foundation, echoing widespread anger felt among rights defenders here over the amnesty’s failure to encompass hundreds of academics, journalists and politicians jailed for expressing views deemed “threatening to the unity of the Turkish state.”

“The people are now asking,” said Ilnur Cevik, editor in chief of the influential English language Turkish Daily News, “why their representatives in parliament can forgive people for committing crimes against their fellow citizens while it does not do so for crimes committed against the state?”