A tricky neighbour to Europe
Turkey’s reaction to the weekend’s failed coup — with curbs to civil rights and the purge of tens of thousands of civil servants — has been met by finger-wagging from its European neighbours. Belgium and Austria have both summoned their Turkish ambassadors to discuss the current situation in Turkey, which is now under a state of emergency. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has warned Ankara to limit the state of emergency to the shortest possible time. “That is also in the interests of Turkey itself,” he said in a statement, “since anything else would tear apart the country and weaken Turkey both internally and externally.”
The European Union has a vested interest in keeping its often troublesome neighbour stable, not least because Brussels has singled out Ankara as the bloc’s key partner in solving the continent’s refugee crisis.
But as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan oversees a major purge of state institutions, he is not listening to the EU’s words of caution.
European countries “definitely have no right to criticise Turkey,” Erdogan said, arguing that France declared a state of emergency for far less as it responds to a persistent terrorist threat.
“The main worry for someone who has been a target of a violent coup is not to listen to humanitarian appeals from the international community, but to save his life and the lives of those close to him,” explained Professor Alessandro Orsini, Director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, in an editorial for Il Messaggero newspaper.
The government in Ankara is considering reinstituting the death penalty, which it abolished in 2004 as it intensified its efforts to join the EU.
But the bloc has sent a loud and clear message to Turkey in recent days, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, saying: “A country that has the death penalty cannot be an EU member.”
“If Turkey were to reintroduce the death penalty, negotiation on accession to the European Union would be immediately halted, since [Turkey] would be in breach of European Union principles,” Italy’s parliamentary affairs minister, Maria Elena Boschi, told fellow lawmakers in Rome last Wednesday.
But Boschi also stressed that Turkey must be kept on side for its mediating role in a range of ongoing crises, stretching from the Middle East to the Mediterranean.
According to a recent UN report, Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees globally, roughly 2.5 million people. Now, amid reports of Turkish coup plotters heading to Greece to file asylum claims, the country has upped its coastguard presence in the Aegean Sea.
Meanwhile, the recent putsch has rattled the nerves of Cyprus.
Until the coup, Erdogan was seen as a figure of hope for solving a decades-long geopolitical division between the island’s Greek south under the EU and the Turkey-affiliated north.
“If the Turkish military had taken over, we would be back at square one,” a Greek journalist said.
But the Cypriots are still in “a cold sweat,” as one academic said on condition of anonymity, adding that many are uncomfortable with pinning their hopes of a solution on a leader seen by many as increasingly authoritarian.
EU membership and the Cyprus problem have no doubt slipped to the bottom of the Turkish president’s priorities in recent days.
There has been a din of warnings from European neighbours as Turkey grows increasingly authoritarian in the wake of a failed coup. But does the government in Ankara care?