TURKEY MUST MOVE FAST TO AVOID EU SETBACKS
By Paul Taylor

Gulf Times, Qatar
July 26 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 November 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.

"I trust that the new government in Turkey will immediately relaunch
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. – Reuters