KOUCHNER OPPOSED TURKEY’S EU BID

PanARMENIAN.Net
08.04.2009 14:48 GMT+04:00

France’s Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said Tuesday he had turned
against the idea of allowing Turkey to join the European Union because
of Ankara’s behavior at last week’s NATO summit.

"Turkey’s evolution in, let’s say, a more religious direction,
towards a less robust secularism, worries me," he told RTL radio.

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy has long been opposed to Turkey’s
EU bid and that has been official French policy, but his foreign
minister had been more open to the idea, at least until Saturday’s
talks in Strasbourg.

Kouchner said he had been surprised when Turkey’s delegation to
the NATO summit had initially refused to accept the appointment of
Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the alliance’s new
secretary general.

"I was very shocked by the pressure that was brought on us," Kouchner
told his interviewer, when asked why he had spoken of his former
support for Turkey’s European ambitions in the past tense.

Rasmussen made enemies in the Muslim world in 2005 when he defended the
freedom of expression of Danish cartoonists who mocked the Prophet
Mohammed, and has angered Turkey by refusing to close a Kurdish
television channel.

Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul delayed talks at the summit by refusing
to accept Rasmussen’s nomination, and only dropped his veto threat
after US President Barack Obama brokered a compromise deal.

Rasmussen has since promised to reach out to the Islamic world, Turkey
is to have a NATO deputy secretary general post and Obama came out
forcefully in favor of Turkey’s EU membership bid.

"It’s not for the Americans to decide who comes into Europe or not,"
Kouchner retorted. "We are in charge in our own house."

The foreign minister, a former Socialist and humanitarian leader
who joined Sarkozy’s right-wing administration in 2007, said Turkey
had been "to say the least, clumsy" in bringing up the issue of the
Mohammed cartoons.

Turkey’s current government is led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan’s AKP party, which has its roots in the Islamist movement.

Turkey began negotiations on becoming an EU candidate country in
2005. If it joined it would become the Union’s biggest member in
terms of population, and its first with a Muslim majority.

France, Germany and Austria have come out against the idea, while
Britain and the president of the European Commission, Manuel Barroso,
support it, AFP reported.

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