ERDOðAN, SARKOZY HAVE FIRST MEETING, AGREE TO TALK MORE
Today’s Zaman, Turkey
Sept 26 2007
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan met with French President Nicolas
Sarkozy for the first time since the conservative politician, who
is a staunch opponent of Turkey’s membership in the European Union,
was elected president.
Turkey’s troubled bid to join the EU was a key issue in Erdoðan’s
talks with French President Sarkozy.
The two leaders discussed Turkey’s EU bid in their half-an-hour meeting
on Monday on the margins of UN General Assembly meetings in New York
and agreed to continue talks on the subject, diplomats said.
Neither Erdoðan nor Sarkozy spoke to the press after the closed-door
gathering, but diplomats said it was "substantive and productive."
Sarkozy opposes Turkey’s membership in the EU, saying the predominantly
Muslim country whose territory mostly lies in Asia does not belong to
Europe. Instead, he said Turkey should lead a group of Mediterranean
countries that have close ties with the EU. Ankara says considering
any formula other than full membership is out of the question.
Sarkozy’s election as French president has further strained ties
between Turkey and France, already chilly because of the French
position in support of Armenian claims of genocide at the hands of
the Ottoman Turks in the beginning of the last century. Turkey has
excluded French companies from defense tenders in protest of the
French Parliament’s passage of a law last year that criminalized
denial of the alleged genocide, and commercial ties have also been
negatively affected.
But relations may pick up new momentum despite all the negative
developments taking place in the background. Sarkozy has come under
criticism from his far-right rivals that he is softening his stance
on Turkey when reports said he was seeking to revoke a constitutional
clause introducing a referendum on accession of new members into the
EU after candidate Croatia joins. The clause, introduced during the
term of former President Jacques Chirac, was widely seen as a step
to prevent Turkey’s accession to the bloc.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner has also recently suggested he
was trying to soften Sarkozy’s stance on Turkey. The French minister is
expected to visit Ankara next month for talks with Turkish officials.
On Friday, new French Ambas-sador to Turkey Bernard Emie also told
President Abdullah Gul that his country wanted to see momentum in
its relations with Ankara despite differences on certain issues.
UN diplomacy
Erdoðan also met with Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates, whose
country currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, Austrian
Prime Minister Alfred Gusenbauer, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis
Rodriguez Zapatero and Swedish Prime Minister Frederik Reinfeldt.
Ways to achieve progress in Turkey’s EU talks were a key issue in
talks with Socrates, diplomats said.
Later in the day, Erdoðan attended a fast-breaking dinner, or iftar,
hosted by Coca Cola Company CEO Muhtar Kent and attended by senior
representatives of major US firms. Erdoðan called on US investors to
invest more in Turkey and pledged that the Turkish government and the
bureaucracy would do their best to remove barriers for US businesses.
"We want the US business world to explore the opportunities that
Turkey has to offer. I have no doubt this will happen, but I want
you to hurry," he was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency.
"Trade volume between our countries has exceeded $10 billion; this
is a comical figure. It should go much higher."
–Boundary_(ID_Y7P0RtPgMKKfe6iGmMm8 Sg)–