‘TURKEY MUST AVOID EU SETBACKS’

The News – International, Pakistan
July 24 2007

BRUSSELS: Turkey faces a potential "triple whammy" of blows to its
European Union membership bid later this year unless re-elected Prime
Minister Tayyip Erdogan moves quickly to enact human rights reforms,
EU diplomats say.

Ankara’s accession talks, launched in October 2005, have already been
slowed to a trickle by the suspension of part of the negotiations over
its refusal to open its ports and airports to traffic from EU member
Cyprus. Now the Turks face a negative European Commission progress
report, renewed pressure from Cyprus, and French demands for the EU
to discuss setting final borders, with Turkey on the outside.

"Erdogan needs to push laws through the new parliament on freedom of
expression, the rights of religious minorities and other fundamental
freedoms quickly to give the Commission something positive to report,"
a senior EU official said. Without that, the annual progress report
due on Nov 7 is bound to conclude that reforms have virtually ceased
over the last year, he said.

EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn made the point forcefully in
congratulating Erdogan on Sunday’s landslide general election victory
for his Islamist-rooted AK party.

"We need in particular to see concrete results in areas of fundamental
freedoms such as freedom of expression and religious freedom," he
told a news conference on Monday. "I trust that the new government
in Turkey will immediately re-launch the reform process so we can
produce results (before)our next progress report in early November."

Joost Lagendijk, co-chairman of the EU-Turkey Joint Parliamentary
Assembly, said the top priority was to amend or abolish article 301 of
the Penal Code, used repeatedly to prosecute writers and journalists
for "insulting Turkishness". That law was used to prosecute Nobel
prize winning author Orhan Pamuk and to convict Turkish-Armenian
editor Hrant Dink, later murdered, for expressing peaceful views on
the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915.

A long-stalled law on religious foundations giving more rights to
Christian and other minorities and better treatment to the Orthodox
Ecumenical Patriarch in Istanbul is another priority, Lagendijk said.

Turkish political commentators say Erdogan will face resistance from
a nationalist opposition, whose acquiescence he needs to get his
candidate for president chosen by parliament. The presidency, though
armed with few executive powers, is a potent symbol of secularism
for a conservative establishment that suspects Erdogan of harbouring
a secret Islamist agenda.

The prime minister must also tread carefully with a military suspicious
of his Islamist past and nervous about some EU-driven reforms. The
AK party has cut back the generals’ formal state powers under these
reforms, but they remain a force on the political stage.

Erdogan could win more European goodwill by withdrawing some troops
from northern Cyprus, making a concession on trade with Cyprus or
opening Turkey’s border with Armenia, but such moves seem unlikely
as they would inflame nationalist sentiment.

Diplomats said Cyprus and France would likely jump on a critical
European Commission report to demand further sanctions against Turkey
or a rethink of its candidacy. That too could provoke a nationalist
backlash among Turks. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has repeatedly
said Turkey is in Asia Minor, not Europe, and has no place in the EU.

His foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said on Monday that Paris
had a problem with five of the 35 "chapters" or policy areas into
which the accession talks are divided, because in French eyes they
assumed the outcome of full membership. But it was willing to allow the
rest of the negotiations to proceed. Another senior French official,
Jean-Pierre Jouyet, has suggested Sarkozy could be satisfied in Dearch
division chief, as saying a fair price for oil would be around $60
to$65 a barrel. However, Yarjani said, "the comment did not mean that
OPEC would change its output in order to reach that price range."

"What the official meant was that this price range was a proper price
for consumers, producers and oil investors," he said. OPEC President
Mohammed al-Hamli said in an interview with Reuters on Sunday the
cartel was concerned about the effect of the near-record price of
oil on the world’s economy, but it has seen little sign that economic
growth has been hurt by higher energy costs.