DUBAI, June 21: Turkish President Suleyman Demirel has asked secularist Mesut Yilmaz, leader of Motherland Party (ANAP), to form the country's new government, regional news agencies said.

The ANAP was, for the past one year, the main Opposition party and the second biggest group in Parliament after the Islamist Welfare Party (RP), with 129 seats in the 550-member House.

On Wednesday, Turkey's first Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan had resigned, giving in to months of pressure from the powerful army over the issue of secularism. ``The president gave Yilmaz the responsibility to form a government that will defuse the current tension in the country,'' Demirel's office said after he met the ANAP leader on Friday.

``I am aware of the importance of the responsibility handed to me in view of the crucial period the country is going through,'' Yilmaz, 50, said, adding that he would do his best to form a government.

Yilmaz said he would begin talks on a possible coalition with other parties, including the True Path Party (DYP), Democratic Left Party (DSP) and the Republican People's Party (CHP), on Tuesday.

He had earlier made it clear that he would exclude Erbakan's Welfare Party from any such coalition.

Yilmaz was confident about cobbling together a coalition of secularist parties by the month-end. ``In nine days from now...I will give the government list to the President,'' he said. ``The government that I will establish will be one which will receive a vote of confidence in Parliament,'' he added.

Erbakan's resignation was part of an agreement reached by the RP with Conservative Deputy Prime Minister Tansu Ciller's DYP, the junior partner in the coalition.

Under the plan, Ciller was to have headed a DYP-RP coalition government and taken the country to early elections, some two years before they are due in the year 2000. The plan was designed to defuse the crisis with the military, which accused Erbakan of fostering religious activism.

The two leaders were to swap jobs next year under the power-sharing deal drawn up between them last June. Ciller felt she could ward off army pressures on the government better if she took on the top job sooner.

Erbakan had handed over to Demirel a letter from the RP, the DYP and the Grand Union Party (BBP), promising their support to Ciller in the formation of a new government. Together, the three parties have 282 members in Parliament.

In overlooking Ciller's claims and designating Yilmaz to form the new government, Demirel seems to have relied on Turkish political tradition and turned to the second biggest party in Parliament after the RP.

Yilmaz has been Prime Minister twice briefly, first in 1991 for five months and then last year in coalition with Ciller's party to block the RP from coming to power. That arrangement lasted only three months.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.