Turkey fears EU turmoil will affect membership talks

Agence France Presse — English
June 19, 2005 Sunday 12:00 PM GMT

ANKARA June 19 — The rejection of the EU constitution and the bloc’s
budgetary deadlock last week could have a negative impact on Turkey’s
accession negotiations, the country’s foreign minister Abdullah Gul
said Sunday.

“We could not say at this time that everything that has happened
will not affect enlargement and Turkey, we must wait until the dust
settles,” said Gul in an interview with the newspaper Radikal.

However it may take some time for the dust to settle with Josep Borell,
president of the European parliament, not optimistic about a resolution
during Britain’s six-month turn at the rotating EU presidency which
starts July 1.

“The discussions in Brussels and the positions that were taken in
the last phase of negotiations don’t give much hope that we can find
a solution under the British presidency,” Borell said Sunday in an
interview with the Italian newspaper Repubblica.

“We have just welcomed 10 new countries and created legitimate
expectations with others. We can’t be content just to survive. There
must be certainty about financial resources available until 2013 to
allow each country to do their accounts and program their development,”
Borell said.

Turkey, a largely Muslim country of 71 million people, is due to
start accession negotiations on October 3.

Gul said Turkey “would not be provoked” by those who don’t want Turkey
to join the EU, referring to a motion passed by the German parliament
condemning the “massacres” of Armenians by Turks between 1915 and 1917,
which Turkey denies.

Questioned about a possible suspension of the process of EU enlargement
Gul said: “I don’t think that such a situation can occur, but if that
is the case, I would say straight away that we won’t be crying. We will
continue along our path and consolidate our economy and democracy”.

The EU budgetary deadlock provoked a positive reaction in the Germany
press Sunday with one newspaper even thanking British Prime Minister
Tony Blair for his call for budgetary reform.

“The failure of the Brussels summit ended at the right place: we can
now finally think about renewing the ‘financial constitution’ of the
European Union,” said the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

“What legitimate economic justification remains for providing some
60 billion euros in subsidies to European agriculture year after year
(…)” it said.

“Why must Germany, whose per capita revenue is now only slightly higher
than the average for the (EU) 25 and already less than the average
for the former 15, deliver to Brussels a half percent of its GDP,”
the newspaper asked.

Die Welt am Sonntag said: “Thank you, Tony Blair, for making a petty
debate (on the British rebate) a meaningful debate”.