TURKEY NOT GOING TO RENOUNCE EU ACCESSION BID

/PanARMENIAN.Net/
27.06.2009 12:38 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Turkey has urged France and Germany to back its bid
to join the EU, rejecting calls for a special partnership rather than
full membership.

"We will never give up," Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
told reporters in Brussels.

Turkey’s EU accession talks are going at a glacial pace and risk
suspension if Ankara fails to open its ports and airports to Cyprus
this year.

France and Germany want to give Turkey a "privileged partnership"
with the EU. But Mr Erdogan insisted "our goal is full membership".

He also said it was "populist and wrong" to use Turkey’s bid as an
election issue.

Some right-wing parties opposed to Turkey’s bid made gains in the
recent European Parliament elections.

Both opposition inside the EU and insufficient democratic reforms in
Turkey are hampering its bid, BBC reports.

Next week will see a small step forward, when Turkey is due to start
talks on taxation, one of the 35 areas where it is negotiating
EU entry terms. Turkish diplomats argue that their country is of
strategic importance to Europe and that its eventual accession
would send a positive signal to the whole Muslim world. So far,
Turkey has opened talks on 10 out of the 35 "negotiation chapters"
in the accession process, which started in October 2005. But eight
chapters have been frozen because of Ankara’s refusal to open up
its ports and airports to traffic from Cyprus, an EU member. Turkey
says it will not do this until the EU takes steps to end the Turkish
Cypriot community’s economic isolation.