Turkey raps Greek Cyprus for EU stall tactics
Turkey expressed “deep disappointment” Monday over mounting opposition from European Union member Greek Cyprus against its EU entry bid. Turkey has started talks to bring its environmental standards up to EU levels at a meeting in Brussels.
“We are deeply, deeply disappointed by the statement of one member country,” Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu told a press conference after the negotiating session. Calling Turkey’s entry a “strategic choice” for Europe, he urged the EU not to be diverted by “unilateral declarations and approaches.”
Turkey’s quest to become the EU’s first predominantly Muslim member faces intensified opposition from Greek Cyprus, an EU member that this month widened a threat to stall the talks. Turkey has now opened negotiations in 12 of the 35 required EU policy areas and concluded them in one.
Besides Davutoğlu, State Minister and Chief Negotiator for EU talks Egemen Bağış and Environment and Forestry Minister Veysel Eroğlu represented Turkey at Monday’s meeting.
While Greek Cypriot animosity to Turkey is shared by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Turkey’s backers in Britain, Scandinavia and parts of Eastern Europe have kept the talks going.
Public qualms in Europe have spurred growing indifference in Turkey. Opposition to Turkey’s membership rose in nine of 11 EU countries surveyed by the German Marshall Fund in September, according to a report by Bloomberg. Some 48 percent in France want to keep Turkey out.
Turkey also has trouble understanding why the EU last week granted visa-free travel to citizens of Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia, three countries of the former Yugoslavia that have not started entry talks, Davutoğlu said. Such treatment smacks of a “double standard,” he added. “There is no excuse not to give Turkish citizens this right.”
No-visa travel first requires Turkey and the EU to reach a deal on the deportation of illegal migrants, something that may take years. Turkey must also upgrade its border controls and issue EU-standard biometric passports.
‘Moving upward’
The “high time and even some hype” for the bid came after the EU’s 1999 declaration that Turkey was an official candidate, Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said. That gave way to “political questioning, and we experienced some lower points from 2004, 2005 onward. I would say this has now more recently stabilized and we are now moving upward again,” he said.
The dispute with Greek Cyprus has dogged Turkey’s bid since talks started in 2005. The internationally recognized Greek Cyprus joined the bloc on its own in 2004 after rejecting a United Nations reunification plan with Turkish Cyprus. Efforts to reunify the island have bogged down since resuming in September 2008.
EU entry gave Greek Cyprus a veto over every step on Turkey’s membership path – power that Greek Cyprus plans to wield more regularly to protest what it sees as Turkey’s lack of economic and political cooperation.
Cyprus will stymie talks in six more policy areas unless Turkey meets as yet undefined conditions in what Foreign Minister Markos Kyprianou this month called a “targeted response, not a complete freeze or a complete halt to the process.”
Kyprianou said Cyprus might block talks to align Turkey’s policies with the EU in the areas of labor mobility, fundamental rights, justice system, education, foreign policy and energy. Talks in eight areas have been frozen since 2006 to punish Turkey for barring traffic from Greek Cyprus at its ports and airports.
Compiled from Bloomberg and AA stories by the Hurriyet Daily News staff
21.12.2009
