8
October 2004
2. "Turkey Struggles to Gain Acceptance in Europe's Christian Club", Christoph Hauser is on friendly terms with his Turkish neighbors on Bergmannstrasse, a street in central Berlin. He knows their children by name and stops by their apartments for tea.
3. "EU will be transformed if Turkey becomes
member", a Turkish entry would affect the balance of
power in the bloc and force changes to its policies in all major areas":
4. "A European Turkey stands to be a guiding
light for the Muslim world", is Turkey ready to officially
become part of Europe? The world will know the answer in another 10
years.
5. "It is up to Turkey to dispel European fears, says Straw", Cyprus issue should be part of negotiations, says Greek Cypriot government.
6. "Dispute Over Kirkuk Could Derail Iraqi Peace, Turkey Warns", Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul on Thursday issued a veiled warning to Iraqi Kurds against trying to claim the ethnically volatile city of Kirkuk, as Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw insisted that the complex dispute over the oil-rich region must be resolved through negotiations.
1. - AFP - "Turkish Kurd activist finally to be hailed for rights award":
BRUSSELS / 8 October 2004
Turkey's Kurdish activist Leyla Zana is to address the European Parliament next week and finally be honoured for an EU human rights prize awarded in 1995 when she was in jail, officials said Friday.
Zana, who was released in June after a decade behind bars, will be hailed personally nine years after she was awarded the Sakharov prize by the European Union's legislative assembly, which she will address on Thursday.
Parliament President Josep Borrell welcomed the trip. "He's very happy she's coming because ... she received the Sakharov prize a long time ago," said his spokesman Jacques Nancy, adding: "That means that Turkey is making progress."
Zana and a group of fellow Kurdish activists were jailed in 1994 for 15 years on charges of collaborating with separatist Kurdish rebels. The EU prize was handed over to Zana's husband in January 1996. Her release from jail was a surprise twist in one of the most politically charged cases in EU-hopeful Turkey. The four were seen as prisoners of conscience by the European Union.
The Brussels visit will come a week after the European Commission recommended that the EU start membership negotiations with Turkey, which first started moves towards joining the bloc over 40 years ago. The commission's views will form the basis for a decision to be taken by EU leaders at a mid-December summit. They are expected also to give a green light, while attaching strict conditions and warning that EU entry is not guaranteed.
Zana, married at 14 to a Kurdish activist who introduced her to politics,
became the first Kurdish woman to win a seat in Turkey's parliament
in 1991. She immediately drew Ankara's wrath by wearing a headband
in the Kurdish colors at the swearing-in ceremony and defiantly vowed
in Kurdish to continue the struggle so Kurds and Turks could live
together in democracy. 
2. - Bloomberg - "Turkey Struggles to Gain Acceptance in Europe's Christian Club":
8 October 2004
Christoph Hauser is on friendly terms with his Turkish neighbors on Bergmannstrasse, a street in central Berlin. He knows their children by name and stops by their apartments for tea.
Still, like a majority of Germans, Hauser says he is dubious about Turkey's bid to be the European Union's first predominantly Muslim member. The European Commission on Oct. 6 recommended starting accession talks with the possibility that Turkey would join between 2015 and 2020.
What spooks Hauser is Turkey's size and religion. Turkey, whose population is now 70 million and 99.8 percent Muslim, would become the largest country in the EU should its candidacy succeed in 10 or 15 years. Opinion polls show a majority of French and Germans oppose Turkish membership, setting Western Europe against a country whose EU subsidies could consume as much as 10 percent of the annual budget.
``I especially have cultural objections,'' says Hauser, a 32- year-old German-studies student, whose central Berlin neighborhood is 10 percent Turkish. ``It is a totally different religion with different values. And with so many people, I am not sure it will work.''
Turkey alone has as many people as all of the 10 mostly Eastern European countries that joined the bloc in May. An EU rejection of Turkey would be seen as a rejection of Islam, says Pierre Lellouche, a deputy in the French National Assembly.
`Fear'
``The bottom line is fear,'' says Lellouche, 53, a member of French President Jacques Chirac's governing party, the Union for a Popular Movement. ``I think it is linked to a fear of the Arab immigration that has already made Islam France's second religion. Add to that fear of terrorism, add to that fear of millions of Turks in the European Union, and you have a very simple equation.''
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, 60, said on Sept. 16 he supported Turkish membership, provided it meets the EU's conditions. Yet a survey of 501 Germans by market researcher Emnid conducted on Sept. 14 showed 57 percent opposed Turkish accession, up 6 percentage points since April. The poll had a 3-percentage- point margin of error.
Turkey's population by 2020 will be 83 million, according to projections by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development. That would make it the largest country in the EU, surpassing Germany, whose current population of 82 million is expected to stay at that level in the same period.
More Voting Power
Turkey's candidacy -- supported by the U.S. -- comes as EU members debate a new constitution that would give countries with large populations more voting weight. One clause would require all EU decisions that don't need unanimity to be backed by at least 65 percent of the EU population and 55 percent of member states.
``The constitution would make Turkey dangerous,'' says Philippe de Villiers, 55, a French member of the European Parliament whose campaign posters in June featured a ``non'' splashed across the Turkish flag.
France and Germany are concerned that their influence will be diminished, says Hayrettin Aydin, a researcher at the Foundation Center for Studies on Turkey at Essen University in Germany. ``There is a fear among the old elites that Turkey would be the biggest member,'' he says.
French Referendum?
Chirac, 71, on Oct. 1 called for a referendum in France on Turkey's membership, to be held at a date close to its potential entry. The goal, he said at a meeting in Strasbourg, is to keep the Turkish issue out of the debate over the constitution itself, which will be put to a popular vote in France as well as in the U.K. and nine other countries next year.
A survey by French polling company Ipsos taken Sept. 24-25 showed that more than 56 percent of the country's citizens are opposed to Turkey joining the EU. The poll, taken among 932 people, had a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points.
Turkey's Islamic culture, which dates back to the beginning of the Ottoman Empire in 1301, is tempered by the secular democracy of the 81-year-old Turkish republic. Yet the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has its roots in Turkey's Islamist parties, backed a ban on adultery earlier this year. The prohibition, protested by women's groups worldwide, was withdrawn last month at the insistence of the European Commission.
`Qualified Yes'
Europeans also are concerned about Turkey's location, stretching across the Strait of Bosporus to the borders of Iraq and Syria near what de Villiers calls ``one of the world's worst conflict zones.''
In November 2003, Istanbul was struck by terrorists who set off bombs in two synagogues, the British consulate and a U.K. bank, killing 62 people. Ten people are on trial for the attacks; defendant Adnan Ersoz said on Sept. 13 that he had helped set up a meeting between the cell's leader and al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
The European Commission, in its report Oct. 6, said it would keep pressing Turkey to meet European standards on democracy, human rights and economic conditions. ``It is a qualified `yes,''' Romano Prodi, the commission's 64-year-old president, told the European Parliament.
The report set no date for the start of talks, which can be canceled should Turkey fail to fulfill pledges on granting political freedom and cutting government spending. The EU's 25 political leaders will decide in December when and if the negotiations should begin. The Turkish Parliament has enacted 460 laws and amendments in such areas as minority rights and the role of the military in the 18 months since Erdogan, 50, took power.
A Step Too Far
``Until a year ago, most people did not quite believe that this was a real possibility,'' says Zeyno Baran, director for international security programs at the Washington-based Nixon Center. ``We never thought Turkey would come this far on its reforms.''
It has come too far for Germany's main opposition party, the Christian Democratic Union. Angela Merkel, 50, the chairwoman, proposes a ``privileged relationship'' with Turkey instead.
``We should not give Turkey any false promises because then there will be disappointment,'' Merkel said in February at the congress of the European People's Party.
Turkey wouldn't just be the largest EU member, it would be the poorest. Its per-capita gross domestic product, at $3,383 in 2003, according to the Turkish State Institute of Statistics, is 27 percent of the EU average as calculated by Eurostat.
A Lot to Digest
In a letter to fellow EU commissioners in June, Franz Fischler, 58, in charge of agriculture, estimated that Turkish membership could cost 11.3 billion euros ($14 billion) a year in agricultural subsidies alone. That equals all agricultural aid granted to the 10 EU members admitted in May and is more than 10 percent of the EU's annual budget.
``It will definitely be much more expensive than the present round of enlargement,'' says Jozsef Szajer, 43, a member of the European Parliament from Hungary's Fidesz Party. ``Turkey will definitely be a big piece to digest.''
The EU's enlargement has further complicated Turkey's chances. In addition to Poland, Hungary and the eight other new members this year, Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia are candidates to join over the next five years. They would bring the number of EU members to 28 by the end of this decade.
Public Opinion
``The bigger Europe gets, the more difficult it is to get in,'' says Ahmet Sever, a consultant to Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and president of an EU communications liaison group based in Ankara. ``Public opinion in Europe was against the enlargement to the East, and no one took it into account. Now people are suddenly remembering public opinion when it comes to Turkey.''
The total cost to the EU economy would be about 0.2 percent of the region's projected GDP for 2015, the most likely year of accession, according to a study published by the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies last month. EU transfers to Turkey would amount to 4 percent of Turkey's projected GDP.
In today's values, the cost of agricultural subsidies to Turkey would be about 9 billion euros and the overall bill close to 20 billion euros, says Daniel Gros, director of the center and co-author of the budget study. These figures differ from Fischler's estimates, since such calculations, based on unknowns such as economic growth in both the EU and Turkey, are speculative.
Ottoman Empire
Still, Gros says financial costs aren't the main reason for the opposition to Turkey's membership. ``The cultural argument is the decisive one,'' he says. Similarly, Frits Bolkestein, an EU commissioner from the Netherlands, warned on Sept. 6 at Leiden University that Turkey would speed up the ``Islamization'' of Europe.
That argument dates back to the centuries-long struggle between the Ottoman Empire and Europe's largely Christian nations. The litany of conflict includes the Turks' 1453 capture of Constantinople -- now Istanbul -- their siege of Vienna in 1683 and their occupation of the Balkans and Hungary.
``Turkey has always represented another continent throughout history, in permanent contrast to Europe,'' said Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, 77, the German-born head of the Roman Catholic Church's Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican, in an interview published in Le Figaro magazine in August.
In 1963, Turkey became an associate member of the European Economic Community, as it was called then, and applied formally for EU membership in 1987. In 1999, it was granted candidate status.
Backed by Bush
U.S. President George W. Bush, at a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Istanbul in June, reiterated the U.S.'s longstanding support for Turkish membership in the EU. ``I believe you ought to be given a date by the EU for your eventual acceptance into the EU,'' he told his Turkish hosts.
Turkish membership is an issue not just for the citizens of Turkey, but for the EU's own Muslim population, which Aydin of the Turkish studies center estimated at 13.5 million before the entry of the 10 new countries. About 4 million Turkish citizens live outside Turkey, most of them in Europe, according to the Turkish Foreign Ministry.
Of these, 2.5 million live in Germany. Turkish immigrants there can have dual citizenship until they are 18; after that, they are required by German law to make a choice. In 2001, more than 10 percent of Berlin's 3.39 million residents were foreign- born, of which 29 percent were Turks, according to city statistics. In the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg neighborhood where Hauser lives, Turks make up about 10 percent of the population of 252,000.
Turks in Europe
``If you argue that Muslim countries cannot be adequate, what do you say to the Muslims now living in the EU?'' asks Aydin.
Besides backing Chirac's proposal for a French referendum, both Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, 49, and Prime Minister Jean- Pierre Raffarin, 56, have recently stated their reservations about Turkey's possible membership.
Sarkozy said in a televised interview on LCI channel on Sept. 26, that religion wasn't an issue. ``This is not because this is a Muslim country, but because it would represent the equivalent of the recent accession of 10 new countries,'' he said. ``That is no small matter.''
Former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing, 78, who headed
the group that drafted the EU's new constitution, said two years ago
that Turkish membership would spell the ``the end of the European
Union.''
3. - The Straits Times - "EU will be transformed if Turkey becomes member":
A Turkish entry would affect the balance of power in the bloc and force changes to its policies in all major areas
BRUSSELS / 7 October 2004
Turkey's bid to join the European Union will not only accelerate change in that country. It will also drive a profound transformation in the organisation itself.
Never before has the club tried to accommodate such a large country, or such a poor one. Its borders will extend into one of the world's most unstable and dangerous regions.
'Accession of Turkey to the union would be challenging both for the EU and Turkey,' the European Commission (EC) said on Wednesday.
Turkey's entry would force the EU to review almost every aspect of the way it operates, from its farm policies and regional subsidies to its defence and security capabilities.
Its membership would also reopen questions about whether Europe can function as an expanded club of 28 or more members.
In terms of economic muscle, Turkey would make little difference.
Its GDP today represents just over 2 per cent of the EU's total. But with a GDP per capita figure of just 28.5 per cent of the bloc's average, its relative poverty could place a big strain on the EU taxpayer.
Early EC estimates put the net cost of Turkish membership in 2025 at between 16.5 billion euros (S$34.5 billion) and 27.9 billion euros.
A debate has started here about changing the rules for regional aid spending to cut the future bill for Turkey, which would be eligible for the highest level of subsidies.
Its accession might also prompt an overhaul of the Common Agricultural Policy, the most costly EU expense.
The EC's impact study on Turkish accession notes that 33 per cent of the country's workers are in agriculture, compared with 5 per cent in the EU as a whole.
Turkish membership would also change the way the EU makes decisions.
As the most populous member state, it would have the most powerful voice in the Council of Ministers. The EC said Ankara could block decisions by joining forces with 'a small number of larger states'.
4. - The Daily Times - "A European Turkey stands to be a
guiding light for the Muslim world":
7 October 2008
Is Turkey ready to officially become part of Europe? The world will
know the answer in another 10 years. A decade may sound a long time,
but the ball is finally rolling on Turkey's European Union membership
after 40 years of wavering talks. This is the case because the EU's
executive body, the European Commission, on Wednesday gave Turkey
the green light to EU accession negotiations that successive governments
of the mainly Muslim country of 70 million have coveted so passionately
for so long.
This is certainly a major achievement for Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, and for his Islamically-oriented Justice and Development Party government. Erdogan, in fact, is now a historical figure - he has been bolder than any other Turkish leader in making hard decisions and pushing through the necessary reforms to open the door to the EU.
As a result of these significant events, Turkey will now be undergoing major changes which will eventually, inevitably, affect the region, Syria and Iraq in particular. Besides help from Europe, Turkey will also need help from the region, and the best way the Arab and Islamic worlds can help - and benefit themselves - is to participate in Turkey's economic, social and political transformation.
How Turkey develops as an incubator of Islam in the modern Western world will be one of the most fascinating aspects of the 10-year transition period to full EU membership - presuming the accession process is carried through to a successful conclusion. How a Muslim society and an Islamic interpretation of life germinate in the environment of the industrial world will be instructive for Muslim countries worldwide. Indeed, the challenges of post-modernism and post-industrial economies in an increasingly globalized world await politicians in Ankara as much as the Turkish population at large.
Being contemporary does not necessarily contradict a nation's history
or its proud traditions - and Turkey certainly has a very long history
both as an empire and as a nation. Change can enrich faith, and in
this new journey to Europe, Turkey stands to be a guiding light in
the region, a model that change and Islam are not at loggerheads.
5. - Daily Times - "It is up to Turkey to dispel European fears, says Straw":
Cyprus issue should be part of negotiations, says Greek Cypriot government
ANKARA / 7 October 2004
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on Thursday said it was within Turkey’s power to dispel European doubts over its EU membership bid by making steady progress in eventual accession negotiations.
The European Commission on Wednesday recommended that EU leaders set a date to launch membership talks with Ankara when they meet on December 17 to assess Turkey’s situation.
The recommendation, however, came with a number of stringent conditions and a warning that a likely start of negotiations would not guarantee membership.
Many observers saw the remarks as intended to sooth widespread concerns in European public opinion that Turkey, a vast, relatively poor and overwhelmingly Muslim country, will not fit in with the bloc. “All negotiations are open-ended,” Straw told reporters after talks here with his Turkish counterpart, Abdullah Gul. “The crucial point is to build momentum.
“My sense is that after a while, everybody will say ‘What is the argument? Of course Turkey should be here’,” Straw added. “Turkey and Turkey’s friends can help Turkey’s future in a positive way.”
He congratulated the Turkish government for their “extraordinary achievement”, but acknowledged points of “concern” in the Commission report.
Meanwhile in Nicosia , a Cypriot official said that settling Cyprus’s decades-old partition should be a condition imposed on Turkey during its European Union membership negotiations.
“As part of Turkey’s EU progression the aim should be (for
the EU) to take into consideration that a settlement of the Cyprus
problem be a necessity on the basis of the principles which govern
the operation of the European Union,” said Kypros Chrysostomides,
spokesman for the Greek Cypriot government.
6. - AFP - "Dispute Over Kirkuk Could Derail Iraqi Peace, Turkey Warns":
ANKARA / 7 October 2004
Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul on Thursday issued a veiled warning to Iraqi Kurds against trying to claim the ethnically volatile city of Kirkuk, as Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw insisted that the complex dispute over the oil-rich region must be resolved through negotiations.
"Kirkuk is a city that belongs to all Iraqis and all of Iraq's natural resources also belong to all the Iraqi people," Gul told reporters after talks with Straw here.
"If harm comes to these (principles), then harm will come to peace in all Iraq," he said.
Ankara fears that Iraqi Kurds, staunch allies of the United States in Iraq, are plotting to take control of the oil-rich northern city, which also has a large population of Turkmens, an ethnic minority of Turkish descent.
"There should be no provocative acts aiming to maximize (the Kurds') status or strenghten their the position... That would be a problem in Iraq's path toward stability," Gul said.
Turkey has repeatedly warned against attempts to upset Kirkuk's delicate demographics; Iraqi Kurds say the city was overwhelmingly Kurdish in the 1950s, before the Baghdad government launched a deliberate "Arabization" campaign.
Thousands of Arabs were encouraged during Saddam Hussein's 24-year rule to settle in Kirkuk and the Kurds are now trying to chase them out.
Straw, who came to Turkey late Wednesday from Iraq, acknowledged that the Kirkuk dispute was a complex issue, but said the opnly solution lay in a proper negotiation process.
"The Kirkuk issue is very difficult -- we understand that -- but it will have to be resolved by negotiations," said Straw, who also visited Kirkuk during his two-day stay in Iraq.
"These problems cannot be resolved overnight and not without a proper process and compensation," he said.
Turkey believes Kurdish control of the area's oil resources could further strengthen the hand of the Iraqi Kurds, whom it suspects of planning to break away from Baghdad's central control.
Such a prospect, Ankara fears, could fan separatist sentiment among its own Kurdish population -- some 13 million strong -- in neighboring southeast Turkey.
Straw sought to allay Ankara's concerns, saying Iraq would remain intact.
"The decison of the international community... is that the international
boundaries of Iraq, obviously including the international boundary
between Iraq and Turkey, are inviolable and cannot be changed,"
he said.