By Daniel Dombey and George Parker in
Brussels and Vincent Boland in Ankara
Published: November 8 2006
Turkey was on Wednesday given a
month to rescue its bid to join the European Union, as Brussels sought to allay
public concerns that the EU is expanding too far and too fast. In response,
Ankara said it was up to the 25-nation bloc to keep the negotiations alive.
“It is clear that Turkey is not
fulfilling its obligations,” Philippe Douste-Blazy, France’s foreign minister,
said yesterday. Unless Ankara changed its behaviour, “it seems to me necessary
to review Turkey’s EU membership timetable”.
The issue is set to come to a head at
an EU summit next month. But Olli Rehn, EU enlargement commissioner, held out
hope that the looming “train wreck” over Turkey’s membership could yet be
averted. “While there’s a will, there’s a way,” he said.
The European Commission had been
considering whether to recommend the formal suspension of three or more of the
34 remaining negotiating “chapters” of Turkey’s membership talks because of
Ankara’s failure to meet a key EU demand over Cyprus.
On Wednesday Mr Rehn announced that the
Commission would not make a recommendation at this stage.
Officials said that Brussels would
probably set out the likely penalties for Turkey in early to mid-December,
ahead of the EU summit. But Mr Rehn’s staff fears that if the EU takes too
tough a stance with Ankara, either the talks will prove impossible to revive or
Turkey will choose to walk away.
“At this point, much of the
responsibility for continuing the [EU] accession process lies with the EU
rather than with Turkey,” said the Turkish government in an official statement.
Ankara added that the issue of Cyprus should not be linked to its own
membership bid.
But the Turkish statement appeared to
acknowledge that its preparations for EU membership needed to be stepped up.
“We will correct the problems stemming from implementation,” said Abdullah Gul,
Turkish foreign minister.
Wednesday’s Commission report highlighted
the issue that could bring the negotiations to a halt – the country’s refusal
to open up its ports to vessels from Cyprus, which is an EU member but which
does not have diplomatic ties with Ankara.
The report also criticised Turkey for
letting the pace of reform slow and expressed its concern over prosecutions of
writers and journalists for criticising “Turkishness” and the Turkish state.
The report voiced the Commission’s concern that Turkey’s judiciary was not yet
sufficiently independent, that its military was not fully under civilian
control and that some cases of torture were still being reported.
Mr Rehn said he hoped the Turkish
parliament would amend the article in the country’s penal code that the
Commission believes restricts freedom of speech. He added that a Finnish
attempt to broker a deal between Turkey, Cyprus and the self-styled Republic of
Northern Cyprus was “the last opportunity to make serious progress for some
years to come on this issue”.
Such a deal would remove the biggest
threat to Turkey’s candidacy. However, many EU diplomats believe the likelihood
of a Finnish breakthrough is slim. A ministerial meeting scheduled for last
Sunday to reach a deal was cancelled.
Under the Finnish proposal, the
Northern Cypriot port of Famagusta would come under EU management and be opened
to trade with the rest of the EU. At the same time, the UN would take charge of
the neighbouring town of Varosha, to which the internationally recognised Greek
Cypriot government lays claim.
Mr Rehn also addressed wider public
fears about the pace of EU expansion with new guidelines for future
enlargements, but insisted the EU should not slam the door on any country with
ambitions to join the club.
His paper on the union’s “capacity to
integrate new members” said any future enlargement should only come after the
union had modernised its creaking institutions, probably by salvaging parts of
the moribund EU constitution.
Learning the lessons of the difficult
negotiations with Bulgaria and Romania – which will join the EU on January 1 –
Mr Rehn said that future talks would have to tackle crime and corruption at an
earlier stage.
But both he and José Manuel Barroso,
European Commission president, have resisted pressure from politicians in
France, Germany and elsewhere to make the EU’s “absorption capacity” a new
condition for membership and have refused to define the eventual eastern
borders of the club.
FINANCIAL TIMES 08/11/06
By Daniel Dombey and Vincent Boland
Published: November 7 2006
The last time Abdullah Gül,
Turkey’s foreign minister, met his European Union counterparts, the occasion
itself was a stark reminder of the divide that frustrates Ankara’s hopes of
joining the EU.
Although Mr Gül, a devout Muslim, was
observing the Ramadan fast, the Luxembourg meeting a few weeks ago began with
what was billed as a working lunch.
Things went downhill from there. The EU
representatives proceeded to chide Turkey for its alleged shortcomings, ahead
of a crucial EU report that comes out on Wednesday on Turkey’s membership
preparations. The incident revealed the strains in the relationship between
Turkey and the EU – tensions that now risk getting out of hand.
“The accession process of Turkey is a
crucial event, not just for the EU and Turkey but for the future of Europe and
the future of east-west relations,” Ali Babacan, Turkey’s chief EU negotiator,
told the FT recently. He added that if its membership bid stalled because of
the current difficulties “the consequences could be devastating”.
This large, poor, secular-but-Muslim
nation of 72m people has been knocking on Europe’s door since at least 1923,
when the republic was founded from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Wednesday,
when the European Commission publishes what is set to be a damning report on
Turkey’s progress in accession negotiations, the problems in Ankara’s relations
with Europe will laid out for the world to see.
Many EU officials fear that the report
will set the stage for a full-blown crisis, which could end with the suspension
of Ankara’s EU negotiations and a halt to the country’s 150-year push to
modernise and westernise.
The Commission will point to two main
complaints about Turkey: that the government has failed to follow through on
political and economic reforms and on its commitment in a deal signed last year
to open its ports and airports to traffic from Cyprus.
“To avoid this train crash, Turkey
needs to relaunch the reform process with full determination and meet its
obligations on Cyprus,” Olli Rehn, the EU’s enlargement commissioner, said last
month. He argues that EU leaders also need to pay much more attention to the
issue than they have to date.
The consequences of a complete breach
would not just be political. The belief that Turkey is committed to undertaking
the reforms necessary to join the EU has been a key peg for financial markets
for the past four years. Now, it appears that investors are taking that
underpinning for granted, ignoring the unstated but incontestable fact that
Turkey’s EU accession process has, for the moment at least, ground to a halt.
Tolga Ediz, an economist who covers Turkey for Lehman Brothers, argues that
this could be a costly mistake for investors.
A crisis is not what either Turkey or
the EU’s leaders envisaged when they agreed to begin the country’s EU accession
process just under two years ago. But since that date, December 17 2004, the
news concerning Turkey’s preparations for membership has been overwhelmingly
negative.
Turkish and European officials
acknowledged then that the negotiations might never lead to actual membership –
France’s constitutional obligation to hold a referendum on Turkish entry to the
EU saw to that. But they added that, even if there were a crisis five or so
years down the line, the process was still likely to be mutually beneficial.
The impetus of the EU talks would push Turkey to carry out constitutional and
economic reforms that were both in its own interest and made the country look
palpably more western and modern.
Instead, the crisis has already
arrived, after two years when neither side has much to show for the
negotiations. Indeed, both parties can justifiably accuse the other of having
failed to meet its commitments. A process Turkey and the EU had been keen to
depict as a virtuous circle has instead become a vicious cycle of
recrimination.
The backdrop for the looming crisis is
Turkey’s reform record. The pace of reform slowed after the 2002-04 period, two
years in which the moderate Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan pushed through
constitutional changes that reduced the role of the military in the political
arena and redrew the country’s penal code.
A draft of Wednesday’s report voices
“serious concern” about freedom of expression in Turkey, questions the
independence of the country’s judiciary and concludes that the military has yet
to come under full civilian control. Throughout its dozens of pages, the report
rarely commends Turkey for the advances it has made in the past year. Instead,
on topic after topic, the refrain is of limited progress or none at all.
Many European officials worry that the
reason that Turkey has made so little progress is that the pro-EU coalition
within the country has splintered.
When Mr Erdogan’s party came to power,
both it and the EU process were overwhelmingly popular. Indeed the popularity
of the EU transcended some of the deepest divisions in Turkish society.
Turkey’s powerful military believed that the perspective of membership would
reduce the power of the Islamists; Mr Erdogan’s AKP thought it would reduce
that of the military, as well as guaranteeing religious freedom. Turkish
business favoured the EU. So did minority groups, such as Turkey’s Kurds, who
thought that the bloc would bolster their rights.
But support for the EU is no longer what
it was. In 2004, a poll by the Turkish newspaper Milliyet said 67 per cent of
respondents thought Turkey should definitely enter the EU. Last month the
figure was 32 per cent.
In the intervening period, the
controversy about the 2003 invasion of Iraq has battered the west’s reputation
within Turkey. The US, in particular, has seen its popularity plummet. In a
recent poll by the German Marshall Fund, only 14 per cent of Turkish
respondents said they supported US leadership of world affairs.
“The US and Europe have been the two
anchors of the west in Turkey,” says Ron Asmus, head of the GMF’s Brussels
office. “Now the US anchor is badly damaged and the EU anchor does not look in
good shape.” The risk he highlights is of a country in one of the most sensitive
regions in the world slipping away from the Euro-Atlantic principles to which
it has held firm for the past half-century.
What makes things worse is that the EU
itself has visibly grown more hostile to the idea of enlargement in the wake of
the May 2004 inclusion of 10 mainly ex-communist countries. A strategy paper,
also due to be adopted by the Commission on Wednesday, makes clear that the EU
will expand beyond 27 member states – Romania and Bulgaria are joining on
January 1 – only in the “medium or long term”, after the bloc has reformed its
institutions.
In a Commission survey published in
July, 48 per cent of EU citizens opposed Turkish membership, even if Ankara met
all the bloc’s conditions. Only 39 per cent supported membership. The figures
are still more striking in some of the individual countries that would have to
agree Turkish membership. In France 54 per cent were opposed, in Germany 69 per
cent and in Austria 81 per cent.
Such figures have bolstered suspicions
within Turkey that the bloc has little or no intention of giving Turkey
membership and that the negotiations with Brussels are a road to nowhere. As a
result, Ankara is still less disposed to make a compromise on the one crucial
issue that could bring its EU quest to a halt – Cyprus.
The internationally recognised Greek
Cypriot government in the south of the island coexists uneasily with the
self-styled Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. A United Nations plan to
reunify the island failed in 2004 after being rejected by the Greek Cypriot
population and government, although it was backed by the Turkish Cypriots.
In response, the EU vowed in April 2004
to end the isolation of the Turkish Cypriots by allowing trade between the
north of the island and the rest of the EU. But Cyprus, which became an EU
member less than a week later, has consistently vetoed any such move. Turkey
regards this as a sign of the EU’s bad faith. Ankara has maintained its refusal
to open up its own ports to Cypriot ships – despite an EU warning last year
that if Turkish ports were not opened, “overall progress in the negotiations”
would be affected.
Now, the crunch is coming. The
Commission will on Wednesday tell Turkey that the negotiations will suffer
unless Ankara opens its ports in the next few weeks. The underlying threat is
that, unless Turkey relents by December, the Commission will recommend a
suspension of the negotiating “chapters” most closely linked to the Cyprus
dispute. But France, Greece and Cyprus want to send a much stronger signal that
many more parts of the negotiations will be affected if Ankara does not meet
the EU’s demand.
All indications are that the dispute
will reach a climax at a mid-December summit of EU leaders. A formal decision
to suspend the entire negotiations remains unlikely. But EU officials fear two
things, above all: first, that the summit will be unable to agree an EU line on
how to respond to Ankara’s defiance, leaving the talks technically in limbo and
in effect suspended, and second, that Turkey may at some point just walk away if
the EU pitches its demands too high.
With the popularity of the EU flagging
within Turkey, and Mr Erdogan keen to build bridges with nationalist elements
within the Turkish state and society, such a gesture may be seen as reasserting
national pride.
Amid such fears, some pro-Turkey
officials are trying to keep their spirits up. One argument is that
expectations are now so low that a breakthrough can be achieved with relatively
little. Mr Erdogan signalled at the weekend that Turkey might consider altering
article 301 of its penal code, which outlaws criticism of Turkishness or the
Turkish state.
To many western eyes this article, the
basis of the abortive prosecutions of the writers Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak,
has become the symbol of everything that is wrong with Turkey today. If it
really were to be amended or junked, the atmosphere surrounding the Turkey
debate would certainly lighten.
Mr Ediz of Lehman Brothers concurs that
the best way for the logjam to be broken is for Turkey to restore the momentum
of domestic reforms. “Unless the government accelerates reform, EU leaders may
want to give Turkey a wake-up call while stopping short of full suspension” at
the December summit, he wrote last week.
Another hope is that Finland, which has
striven without success to broker a temporary deal between Turkey and Cyprus,
will yet manage to forge a compromise. Indeed, all the steps Turkey has taken
towards the EU to date have become possible only after last-minute deals.
“I think everyone will step back from
the brink,” says one diplomat. “At the end of the day, whose interest is it to
bring a halt to these talks?” He argues that though the talks have borne little
fruit over the past two years, that is no reason to rule out change in the
future – particularly after Turkish parliamentary elections in a year’s time.
If, on the other hand, the negotiations come to a halt, anything is possible –
including a much more Islamist or nationalist style of government in Ankara.
But the diplomat concedes that, unlike
past occasions. the crisis is not just a question of dramatics intended to
impress electorates in Cyprus, Turkey and elsewhere. This time, although the
stakes are enormous, the outcome is genuinely uncertain. Worst of all, the
peoples of Turkey and Europe are becoming visibly disenchanted with each other.
FINANCIAL TIMES 08/11/06
By Guler Sabanci
Published:
November 6 2006 19:22 |
Turkey has been an integral part
the twists and turns of European history for 700 years. She has had her good
days and bad days, she has played with strong hands and weak hands, but she has
always been an influential player at the table of European politics. Our
countries know each other rather well.
We should
remember this long history of engagement when discussing Turkey’s European
Union membership negotiations, which formally began just last year. An EU
report on the progress of the talks, due to be released on Wednesday, is being
seen by some as a “crisis point”. Yet there will be no vote on accepting Turkey
as a full member of the union for at least another decade.
FINANCIAL TIMES 08/11/06
Political Dynamics In Cyprus
Meanwhile, in Cyprus itself, despite the first meeting in July this year
between the Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders since 2004, no one is predicting
any rapid moves to a new comprehensive settlement. Some trade is occurring from
north to south across the Green Line but Turkish Cypriots call it cumbersome
and bureaucratic. An EU aid package for the north was agreed in February 2006
but its implementation was blocked, as of July 2006, by the Greek Cypriots in a
European Commission Technical Committee, though some hope the first tranche of
funds will go through in September.
Direct trade for northern Cyprus remains firmly vetoed by the Greek Cypriots
who argue that opening up northern Cyprus ports is tantamount to recognition
(even though the EU argues Turkey opening its ports to Greek Cypriots shipping
is not equal to recognition). Hopes of the EU finding some small package
compromise deal to open up northern Cyprus' Famagusta port
formally (it does already trade) under EU or UN supervision are slight. Without
such a small package, Turkey is unlikely to open its ports and so the
much-predicted EU-Turkey train crash looks likely to happen.
Perhaps as least as important as northern Cyprus's economic isolation (Greek
Cypriots deny this exists at all) is the political isolation of Turkish
Cypriots who have no voice in EU institutions. Despite the intensity and
intractability of the dispute between the two communities on the island, the
Greek Cypriots speak for the whole island in the EU's two key democratic and
law-making institutions – both Council of Ministers and Parliament. It is as if
the Flemish spoke for the whole of Belgium, including on issues where there is
strong disagreement with the Walloons, or as if the English spoke for the
Scottish. The Greek Cypriots argue that this is because the Turkish Cypriots do
not participate in Republic of Cyprus institutions and that the north is an
illegal state. It is the Cypriot 'catch-22'. Without a comprehensive settlement
– for which the Turkish Cypriots voted two years ago – they have no democratic
voice. But they cannot force the Greek Cypriot side to return seriously to the
negotiating table.
The EU needs to recognise
that the Turkish Cypriots are being denied democratic representation in the EU
– a situation the Union agreed to despite its own emphasis on human rights and
democracy. It is indefensible that the smaller party to a dispute that concerns
decisions the Union itself takes (such as on aid and trade for northern Cyprus)
has no voice in the EU and is represented by its opponents in the dispute. The
EU should urgently investigate legal ways to give Turkish Cypriots observer
status in both Council and Parliament. It should also consider recognising
Turkish as an official EU language.
FRIENDS OF
CYPRUS REPORT 08/11/06
Thursday, November 09, 2006 zaman.com
Turkish Foreign
Ministry spokesperson Namik Tan stated that Turkey had so far fulfilled its
commitments on Cyprus and said: “However, we did not get a response. They
should not expect us to take steps unilaterally without getting a response.”
Tan made the statements in the weekly press conference.
In an assessment of the EU Progress Report and Finland’s proposals, Tan said:
“We are talking about a responsibility concerning the issue of Cyprus. This
responsibility does not only fall to Turkey. We see our shortcomings in the
report. The Cyprus problem should not be used against Turkey’s EU accession
process.”
The party that wants to solve the Cyprus problem is Turkey, said Tan, and he
added that Turkey was aware that being an EU member meant not only practicing
the political and technical legislation but also adopting a culture of
compromise.
Turkey has so far followed a very constructive policy and will keep doing so,
he said.
“It is our most natural right to expect a response for our efforts and expect
all parties to act with the same sense of responsibility,” Tan said.
Ministry condemns academics
taking part in conference organised by university in north
By Constantine Markides
THE EDUCATION Minister has condemned the presence of Greek Cypriot academics
participating in a three-day media conference under the aegis of the Eastern
Mediterranean University in occupied Famagusta.
The Education Ministry told daily Phileleftheros that it “condemns any energies
that lead to the direct or indirect recognition of the pseudostate,” although
it did not elaborate exactly in what way a conference on media issues implies
any kind of “direct or indirect recognition” of the north as a state.
The three-day “Peace Journalism Conference” involves presentations by Turks,
Greek, Turkish Cypriots, and Greek Cypriots on issues such as covering human
rights stories, Middle East issues, media bias, and Greek and Turkish
nationalism.
Yesterday’s presentation took place at theFaculty of Communication and Media
Studies. Today’s events are set to take place at the Fulbright Commission in
the Nicosia Buffer Zone, while tomorrow’s are to be either in Ledra Palace or
the Fulbright Commission.
Education Minister Pefkios Georgiades refused to comment on the participation
of University of Cyprus professors in the conference, claiming that was an
internal issue for the university since it is an independent institution.
The newly re-elected rector of the University of Cyprus, Stavros Zenios, took
the same position as the government on the participation of Greek Cypriot journalists
and academics.
“We believe that the universities in the occupied areas function under an
illegal regime,” Zenios said, adding that the University of Cyprus has never
been officially represented in any events organised by universities in the
north.
“The participation of any colleague is to be judged by himself, just as he is
to be judged by any other citizen of the Republic,” Zenios said.
The conference includes seminars like ‘Problems and Experiences of Peace
Journalism in Cyprus’, ‘The Main Obstacle to Greek Peace Journalism:
Ethnocentrism and National Narrative’, and ‘Greece as ‘the Other’ and the
State-Biased Reflection of Greece-related issues in Turkish papers’.
CYPRUS MAIL 10/11/06