It was hardly the start Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan would have hoped for after winning a third straight term in power in June 12 elections and promising to reconcile with the opposition for a constitutional overhaul, his key election pledge.
Shortly before parliament convened for oath-taking, the centre-left Republican People's Party (CHP) announced its members would shun the ceremony, following a boycott decision announced by Kurdish-backed lawmakers last week.
CHP deputies did attend the general assembly but refused to take the floor when invited to be sworn in.
Their Kurdish colleagues did not show up at all in Ankara, convening instead in Diyarbakir, the largest city of the restive Kurdish-majority southeast.
The protest cannot block the functioning of the 550-member house, where Erdogan's Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) has a comfortable majority of 327 seats -- it is rather aimed at putting the AKP under political pressure to seek a solution to the row.
HINTS AT SOFTENED STANCE
Erdogan, who has shown little sympathy for the jailed lawmakers, hinted his party might eventually agree to discuss legal amendments to secure their release.
"Let them (the CHP) put forward their proposals first and we will speak afterwards," Erdogan said, according to Anatolia news agency.
His deputy Cemil Cicek scheduled a meeting with CHP leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu for Wednesday.
Defying a 2007 precedent, the courts last week refused to free nine opposition lawmakers elected while awaiting trial in prison, and the electoral board stripped one of them of his seat.
Two of the detained deputies, journalist Mustafa Balbay and academic Mehmet Haberal, were elected on a CHP ticket. They were imprisoned more than two years ago on charges of involvement in alleged plots to destabilise and overthrow the AKP.
Lawyers had sought their release, arguing the suspects do not pose a risk of destroying evidence or fleeing the ongoing trial.
Kilicdaroglu charged the courts were acting under government pressure and accused the AKP of a "tendency towards a civilian dictatorship."
The massive coup probes, under way since 2007, are already under fire for having degenerated into a campaign to silence AKP opponents.
With trials advancing at a sluggish pace, dozens are kept in prison and prosecutors are yet to secure convictions.
KURDS BARRED
Also barred from assuming their seats were six Kurds, in prison on charges of links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which Ankara lists as a terrorist group for its 26-year separatist insurgency in the southeast.
One of them, veteran politician Hatip Dicle, was stripped of his seat in a separate legal move: the electoral board had allowed him to run in the polls but then ruled he was not eligible because of a terror-related conviction.
The loss of the seat, taken over by the AKP, triggered Kurdish outrage and resulted in a decision by the remaining 30 lawmakers to boycott parliament.
"From now on, we will hold our weekly meetings in Diyarbakir. We will keep our position ... until opportunities for settlement emerge," lawmaker Gultan Kisanak said Tuesday after the Kurdish bloc met in Diyarbakir.
The controversy added to tensions in the southeast that had flared ahead of the elections amid PKK threats to step up violence in a conflict that has already claimed some 45,000 lives.
Erdogan has charged the opposition knowingly created the deadlock, prompting pointed reminders that he himself was the victim of a similar controversy when the AKP came to power in November 2002.
Erdogan became prime minister four months later after the AKP amended laws that had sidelined him from politics over a conviction for Islamist sedition.
