TURKEY MUST PROVE IT IS FIT FOR THE EU
By Boston Herald Editorial Staff

Boston Herald, MA
Dec 3 2006

Pope Benedict XVI took the occasion of his visit to Turkey to let it
be known that he no longer believes Turkey should be excluded from
the European Union. That may help Vatican diplomacy in the wake
of the Pope’s September quoting of a Byzantine emperor of half a
millennium ago on the violent nature of Islam. But it’s not proof
that EU membership is a good idea.

We have supported Turkey’s membership, but now we welcome the
just-arisen impasse in negotiations. It can provide the opportunity
for a long pause, as recommended by the EU Commission, while Europe
and the world see what kind of country Turkey is going to become.

(The impasse arises because of Turkey’s refusal to let ships from
Cypriot ports trade to Turkish ports.)

Turkey asked to join Europe in 1993 and for years seemed to be making
a good case. It even abolished its death penalty to qualify.

But recently Turkey has been backsliding.

The Muslim nature of the country is not an issue for us, though it
is for much of Europe and once was for the pope. Turkey’s secular
revolution of 1923 remains firmly in place. Support for Sharia, strict
Islamic law, has declined from 21 percent to 9 percent in the past
seven years. Prime Minister Recep Erdogan’s Islamist government has
only nibbled at the dominant secularism of public life to accommodate
a measure of religious expression.

But the country has long refused to permit free religious expression
for others. The tiny Christian community is forbidden to operate a
seminary or to publish anything.

Last year prosecutors charged Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize
in literature this year, with "public denigration of the Turkish
identity" because of interview comments about Turkey’s treatment of
its Kurdish and Armenian minorities. The case was later dropped,
but the brand-new law on which it was based, making it a crime to
discuss the 1915 massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians –
a true attempted genocide – remains in force.

The military, which staged coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980 and forced
the resignation of a prime minister in 1997, retains the last word,
and the top general regularly reminds the country of this. This is
quite foreign to real democracy.

As long as Turkish life is curbed in these ways, there is no point
in discussing Cypriot ports.