Spain’s shameful help for Turkey’s dictator

You wouldn’t think that an EU member state would tamely do the bidding of Turkey’s autocratic president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But that is what Spain is in danger of doing, said Johannes Welte in Merkur.de (Munich). Turkish exiles had thought they’d be safe from Erdogan’s vengeance anywhere in Europe. Now they’re not so sure. Along with thousands of other German citizens, Dogan Akhanlı, a 60-year-old Turkishborn writer, had gone on holiday with his wife to Spain. But on arrival at his hotel in Granada, he was arrested – at Turkey’s request – by police armed with an Interpol warrant. There was a furious reaction in Germany, and the amazed Akhanlı was released the next day. But he’s been ordered to stay in Spain until a court decides whether to extradite him to Turkey. If that were to happen, it would be a “legal and political scandal”.

The German government is sitting on 4,500 files of fugitives whom Erdogan claims are complicit in last year’s botched coup, said Yavuz Baydar in El País (Madrid). So far it’s refused to extradite any, knowing how “catastrophic” the lack of justice is there. Not so the police in Spain, who take Turkish claims of wrongdoing at face value. Earlier this year, Can Dündar, a former editor of opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, travelled to Barcelona, but was warned by lawyers to leave before Turkish authorities found out. Spain should wise up to Erdogan’s hostage-taking tactics. It’s shameful that an EU nation should behave this way at the behest of an authoritarian regime.

Akhanlı’s situation is utterly “Kafkaesque”, said Martin Oehlen in Frankfurter Rundschau. A veteran human rights activist, he spent two years in a Turkish military jail in the 1980s, before fleeing to Germany and being granted asylum. Since then he has lived in Cologne as a German citizen, where he has infuriated the Turkish authorities by writing books blaming Turkey for the genocide of Armenians during the First World War. In 2010, he tried to visit his dying father in Turkey, only to be arrested at the airport and charged with membership of a terrorist organisation. He was acquitted when it became clear no such terror organisation existed, but his tormentors still insisted on his guilt and, in 2013, the acquittal was annulled and a new arrest warrant issued. It’s now being said that EU governments should end police cooperation with Turkey, but that’s not an option, said Werner J. Marti in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Zurich). Any country that did so would soon become a safe haven for Turkish delinquents, and Interpol would then be powerless to arrest genuine criminals, who could escape justice simply by pretending to be political dissidents.