TURKEY IN FRONT OF A CHOICE: TO FULFILL EU STANDARDS OR TO BECOME A "THIRD WORLD COUNTRY"

PanARMENIAN.Net
07.06.2007 15:10 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Turkey will be relegated to a "Third World country"
status unless it applies European Union standards of democracy and
the rule of law, its chief EU negotiator, Minister of Economy Ali
Babacan stated.

Babacan made what sounded like a veiled warning to the EU candidate
country’s powerful military and secular judicial establishment after 6
weeks of political turmoil over the election of a new president. "The
events of the last month-and-a-half show how important Turkey and
the European Union are for each other," Babacan said.

"If there is no benchmark and if we think that each country has its own
peculiar conditions and our democracy is specific to us, if we say we
have the rule of law but sometimes we can do things outside of that,
such approaches will condemn Turkey to be a "Third World country"
for decades and decades," Babacan told a conference on EU-Turkey
energy cooperation, Reuters reports.