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| Sunday, 15 December 2002 |
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Turkey accuses EU of double standards but accepts membership talks deal Turkey accused the EU of double standards Friday over its refusal to start membership talks for at least two years, but grudgingly accepted the deal and pledged to press on with democracy reforms needed to join the European club. "We think the double standards the EU countries apply in their political practices are not in line with contemporary values," leading Turkish politician Recep Tayyip Erdogan said. "But despite all these Turkey-European Union relations have been clarified and put on the right track," said Erdogan, leader of Turkey's governing Justice and Development Party, shortly after the EU agreed an historic enlargement at a summit here. Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, whose new Islamist-rooted government has lobbied hard for talks to start next year, had earlier accused the EU of "unacceptable discrimination" after it put off accession talks until at least December 2004. "The date and the time is not as we wished," Gul said. But he later added: "Turkey's route is definite, be it democracy reforms, be it human rights reforms or economic reforms. All of them are being done for the Turkish people. This is what matters and these reforms will continue." Despite the rebuff, EU leaders sought to assure Turkey - the only Muslim member of NATO and a key US ally - that its future lies in Europe, urging Ankara to accelerate efforts to fulfill the EU democracy criteria. In their final statement from the summit, at which they invited 10 nations to join the European club in 2004, they repeated that Turkey's bid would be judged "on the basis of the same criteria as applied to the other candidate states." "The Union will significantly increase its pre-accession financial assistance for Turkey," the statement added. The United States, which sees Turkish support as crucial to any US-led war against Iraq, had worked hard behind the scenes to see Ankara given a 2003 talks date, with both President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell making last-ditch appeals to the EU. That pressure was not entirely welcomed in Europe, with EU Parliament President Pat Cox telling reporters: "Sometimes our friends in Washington D.C. have a heavier hand than the situation might require and this might have been one of those occasions." But Washington nevertheless welcomed the EU decision. "This is a visionary decision by the European leaders for a truly inclusive union... Turkey's continued evolution towards Europe demonstrates for the continent and for the world that Islam and democracy are fully compatible," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told journalists. Turkey had said that if it won an early commitment from the EU, it would give its backing to a UN peace plan to reunify Cyprus, one of the 10 countries invited to join at Copenhagen. But a last-ditch bid by the UN to broker a deal on the divided Mediterranean island failed Friday, meaning that the internationally-recognized Greek Cypriot government is expected to join alone. The EU said it would decide only at the end of 2004 whether to start Turkish membership talks after evaluating progress on democracy and human rights reforms. Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, whose country holds the EU presidency, said negotiations would start by mid-2005 if a decision were taken in December 2004 that Ankara meets the EU's political criteria. Turkey, whose application dates back to 1987 although it became a formal candidate only in 1999, was seeking to start talks in early 2004 at the latest following its adoption of a raft of democracy reforms. The disappointment hit the Istanbul stock exchange, with shares plunging 1.7 percent in a week-long downturn in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit. "This is really one of the worst outcomes Turkey could have gotten. No one expected it," the liberal daily Radikal wrote. Gul specifically accused French President Jacques Chirac of having negatively influenced the decision on Turkey. Both France and Germany had proposed a 2005 date. Many Europeans have misgivings over Turkey's integration with the EU due to cultural differences stemming from its predominantly Muslim faith and a population of some 70 million people. (AFP) |
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