Jon Gorvett reports from Istanbul on the ongoing saga of alleged corruption in high places.

Some 16 months after coming to office on a pledge to clear up corruption within the Turkish state, the government of Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz was unceremoniously booted from power by the country's parliament last November.

A successful vote of no-confidence ended Turkey's fourth government since the 1995 general elections and provided the first example in the republic's history of a prime minister being brought down, over allegations of graft.

The end began last summer with the arrest in France of one of Turkey's most-wanted mobsters, Alaatin Cakici. This coup for the French police, initially welcomed by Ankara, was not to turn out quite as expected though. While under arrest, Cakici released a series of tapes he had made of his phone calls with senior Turkish government ministers. In several of these, Yilmaz himself was implicated as having provided a shield from prosecution for the mobster.

However, it was the linking of Cakici and businessman Korkmaz Yigit that was to eventually bring down the government. Yigit had made a $600 million bid in the privatisation of Turkbank, an event that attracted attention when it became known that he had subsequently been awarded the tender despite his bid being the highest. In addition, his links to Cakici and his shady past were enough to see him arrested in early November.

It seems that Yigit had left himself some insurance against just such an event. The day after his arrest, a video was broadcast on the businessman's two TV stations in which he slammed Yilmaz as the man behind the whole Turkbank scam. According to the businessman, Yilmaz had instructed Cakici to pressure the other bidders in the privatisation to withdraw. Furthermore, he had used Cakici to exert pressure on Yigit himself to make his bid. This clearing of the field through unconventional 'negotiations' was aimed at making a deal with Yigit by which he would then purchase several media operations and ensure that they took a pro-Yilmaz line in the upcoming general elections.

None of the allegations were proven, and indeed insiders from Yilmaz' Motherland Party claim that on this particular occasion Yilmaz was actually innocent, but the highly public airing of so much dirty laundry, combined with the perception that if not on this occasion, then certainly at other times the government had been less than straight, led to the collapse of crucial opposition support for the minority government.

Once this had gone, the end became a foregone conclusion. The opposition party on which the government had relied was the Republican People's Party, led by Deniz Baykal. With Yigit's revelations, the party presented a joint censure motion with the other two main opposition groupings, Tansu Ciller's centre-right True Path Party and the pro-Islamist Virtue Party. The final vote - 314 in favour and 214 against - ended the republic's 55th government and ushered in a period of great uncertainty.

The government's downfall did not come at a particularly good time. A few days before the vote, the Italian government had refused to extradite the leader of the Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK), Turkey's rebel Kurdish separatist guerrillas, whom Italian police had arrested a week before. This had led to outrage from Turkish nationalists, who had begun burning Italian flags, cars and produce in the streets, forcing a boycott by many Turkish companies of Italian goods. This crisis also plunged the Turkish government, which should by rights have been able to use the PKK leader's arrest as a valuable confidence builder, into a confrontation with Italy and increasingly with the EU - this despite Yilmaz' opinion that one of the "two most unlikely things" to happen was that the Kurdish leader would ever be extradited.

The other consequence of the government's fall was that it threw open once again the question of when Turkey might hold its next general election. Previously, a deal between Yilmaz and Baykal had fixed April 1999 as the date, with Yilmaz scheduled to resign at the end of 1998 to give way to an interim government that would prepare the country for the elections. This deal, agreed by parliament, was soon forgotten in the post-government melee. Yilmaz declared his support for holding the elections in February and was followed by much of the media. However, President Suleyman Demirel, whose task it was to appoint a new administration, seemed to favour the appointment of a more long-term regime, postponing elections indefinitely.

In this, the calculations were highly partisan. Yilmaz figured that his government's success in combating the PKK and relatively higher standing in the opinion polls would mean the sooner the election the better. On the other hand, Demirel's known favouring of a more presidential system for the country led to speculation that the highly experienced president would seek to declare a government composed of people that he had hand-picked, which naturally Demirel would want to see stay in office as long as possible.

Whatever the case, the collapse of the government - Yilmaz' third as prime minister - highlighted a series of much deeper problems in the Turkish state. Shortly before the no-confidence vote, Yilmaz' Motherland Party deputies had teamed up with those of Tansu Ciller's True Path to clear each other on parliamentary committees probing allegations of corrupt practices. "It is clear that there are no moral values or principles here," said Baykal, echoing the sentiment amongst many Turks that the established parties have become hopelessly entangled with what are often referred to as the "dark forces" within the state itself.

In this, Yigit's allegations are in many ways only the latest in a steady stream of scandals that has afflicted Turkey's governments since the 1980s. The most recent was the Susurluk scandal, in which, during the period of the previous pro-Islamist Welfare Party-True Path Party coalition, a fatal car crash revealed Turkey's most-wanted gangster to have been travelling under a diplomatic passport issued by the interior minister. Also pulled from the wreckage of the crash was the body of a senior police official. The only survivor, an important True Path Party deputy, was also a clan chief in south-east Turkey whose men were a mainstay of the anti-PKK struggle.

At a stroke, Susurluk showed the close links between the Turkish mafia, the state and the war in the south-east. The gangster killed in the Susurluk crash, Abdullah Catli, was a leader of the ultra-right Grey Wolves, a hit squad used against leftist militants in the late 1970s, against the Armenian ASALA movement in the 1980s and against the PKK in the 1990s. One of Catli's colleagues in this movement had been Alaatin Cakici, who incidentally was also found to be carrying a diplomatic passport on his arrest in France.

It was also Yilmaz who promised on coming to power in mid-1997 that he would get to the bottom of the Susurluk scandal. However, 16 months later, and with the effective burying of the report on the incident, Yilmaz himself seems to have been brought down thanks to the workings of the very same "dark forces" he claimed to be fighting to unveil.

A new Turkish government, however composed, will undoubtedly find that these entanglements with organised crime and the ultra-right will have to be dealt with if it is not to meet the same fate as Yilmaz.