European Report
November 22, 2006
EU/US/TURKEY : WASHINGTON INSISTS IT’S NOT MEDDLING IN CYPRUS ROW
The United States has not taken steps to resolve the current impasse
in Turkey’s EU accession talks and has no plans to do so, a senior
State Department official has told Europolitics. "We cannot intervene
now. Things are at endgame stage and there is no role for us,"
Matthew Bryza, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and
Eurasian Affairs, said on 20 November in an exclusive interview. He
was responding to reports of US moves to help its long-time ally
Turkey out of its tricky predicament, which centres on Ankara’s
refusal to let Greek Cypriot ships and planes enter its ports and
airports.
Bryza, the lead State Department official on this dossier, said he
had "no meetings" on it when he visited Brussels last week. The
reason he was in town was to meet the Armenian and Azerbaijani
foreign ministers to discuss the disputed province of
Nagorno-Karabakh, he said. He admitted he was playing a mediating
role earlier this summer but that "once the Finnish EU Presidency got
active, we backed off". Bryza said unless the EU Presidency asked the
US to get involved, it would not do so. The Finns have set 6 December
as the deadline for reaching agreement on the Cyprus issue as they do
not want it to plague the 14/15 December European Council. EU leaders
are due to decide there whether or not to suspend accession talks
with Turkey given the slowdown in the Turkish reform process noted by
the European Commission in its 8 November report.
ROOM FOR MANOEUVRE
Bryza said that when the EU first agreed to open accession talks, it
did not set a clear deadline for Turkey to apply the Ankara Protocol
(the agreement that requires Turkey to open its ports and airports to
Cypriot ships and planes). He said this "ambiguity" left EU
negotiators and member states a "political space" with which to work.
This dispute is threatening to derail Turkey’s EU membership bid.
Cyprus, backed by Greece, France and Austria, is taking a tough line
on Turkey, while the Finnish Presidency, backed by the United
Kingdom, is trying to prevent a train wreck scenario’ at the December
summit.
The Ankara Protocol, signed in July 2005, extends the EC-Turkey
customs agreement to the ten new EU member states. Turkey is
reluctant to apply it while trade restrictions remain with the
northern part of Cyprus, which only Turkey recognises as an
independent state. Meanwhile, the EU on 27 October gave the green
light for a E139 million aid package for northern Cyprus.
Apart from the Cyprus problem, Bryza stressed "we are all better off
if Turkey continues its reforms," including meeting the Copenhagen
criteria on human rights and democracy and the body of EU law known
as the acquis. The US has long been a loyal supporter of Turkey’s bid
to attain full EU membership. This backing was reiterated by US
President George Bush on 2 October during a joint press conference
with the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.