E.P. REPORT WITH 349 HOLES
By Mustafa Balbay

Cumhuriyet, Turkey
Via Turkish Press
Sept 8 2006

CUMHURIYET- The European Parliament’s Foreign Relations Commission
report was passed by a vote of 52 to 6. The full EP will meet on
Sept. 25-28, and the report will be discussed there. The report’s
content is very harsh. If there is a government in Ankara, it will
criticize this report, declare it unacceptable, and then the EP would
have to respond. Outlines of the report are as follows:

Recognizing the Armenian ‘genocide’ should be a precondition for
Turkey’s full European Union membership.

Turkey should accept the Pontic and Syriac ‘genocides’ as well.

Necessary measures should be taken to protect Alawites.

Problems in democratization, human rights, personal rights and the
southeast should be solved.

EU reforms have slowed down, and they should be accelerated again.

Harbors should be opened to the Greek Cypriot administration.

Progress should be made on reopening the Heybeliada Seminary School
and making the Fener Greek Patriarchate ‘ecumenical.’

These are the main elements in the report, and it has 349 proposed
amendments. Now if all of these had been accepted, Turkey would be
responsible for the following as well:

Killing Native Americans

The hole in the ozone layer

Rapid melting of the ice cap

Hunger in Africa

Rising oil prices

Iran’s insistence on continuing its nuclear program

Apart from this black humor, this report clearly shows that EU members
want to pull Turkey’s strings. Maybe they dealt with this report just
to relax. So what will we do? Won’t we take this report seriously? The
government wants Turkey to believe that EP reports aren’t binding
and they shouldn’t be taken seriously. Thinking this way serves the
government’s interests, but it isn’t the truth.

Firstly, the EP takes Turkey’s pulse with all of these reports and
discusses how it would be welcomed. If Turkey doesn’t criticize
them seriously, it starts to settle the report. After some time,
when Turkey gets a demand, the EU says that we already stressed
these issues in our official reports and your administrators know
this as well. There’s no serious criticism about it, except certain
remarks made by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Foreign Minister
Abdullah Gul and State Minister Ali Babacan about the devious road
to EU membership. This situation indicates that the report will be
accepted by the full EP. For the ruling Justice and Development Party
(AKP), the EU process has ended. We are entering an unpleasant period
in terms of our EU membership process, but we don’t believe that
the EU-AKP relations will spoil, because they can’t find a better
government than the AKP government to drive Turkey into a corner.