Merkel voices great concern
Ankara visit
BERLIN, May 22, (AFP): German Chancellor said some political developments in Turkey were a source of “great concern” and pledged to address them during a visit to the country on Monday.
Merkel, in an interview published Sunday, said she was ready to discuss “all the important questions” with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when they meet in Istanbul on the sidelines of a UN-backed summit on humanitarian relief work.
“Naturally some developments in Turkey are a source of great concern for us,” the German leader told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung at a time when Erdogan has been accused by Western critics of an increasingly authoritarian style.
She said a decision last week by the Turkish legislature to strip scores of lawmakers of their parliamentary immunity would have “serious consequences” for Kurdish politicians, a fact that filled her “with great concern”.
Merkel also said she regretted that “the process of rapprochement and reconciliation with the Kurds was aborted in the past year”.
While Berlin, like Ankara, viewed the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) as a terrorist organisation, she said, the Kurdish population must have an “equal place and a good future in Turkey”.
The European Union and Turkey struck an agreement in March to limit the flow of refugees into the EU, under which Turkey agreed to take back illegal migrants while getting aid for hosting refugees and gaining eased visa rules for the EU.
Merkel defended the controversial deal that her government spearheaded and rejected the notion that the 28-member bloc had made itself too dependent on Ankara.
“Of course there are interdependencies — or you can simply call it the need to balance our interests,” Merkel told the newspaper.
She said that, despite such mutual dependencies, Germany was always ready to voice criticism on developments in a country, “whether in public or in private”.
The visa deal with the EU has been in jeopardy over Ankara’s reluctance to alter its counter-terror laws, a requirement of the agreement, prompting Erdogan to make a series of critical statements about the EU in recent weeks.
Merkel said that she was watching closely how Turkey was meeting its obligations under the agreement and said that “at the moment it fulfils them reliably, and of course I will speak about the state of affairs with the Turkish president”.
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LONDON:
British Prime Minister David Cameron said Sunday it would be decades before Turkey could possibly join the EU, saying that it might happen in the year 3000 on current progress.
Even then, the United Kingdom, like all member states, would have a veto on their entry, Cameron said, with future Turkish accession a key battleground in Britain’s referendum on its own EU membership.
“It is not remotely on the cards that Turkey is going to join the EU at any time soon,” Cameron told ITV television.
“They applied in 1987. At the current rate of progress, they’d probably get round to joining in about the year 3000.”
Cameron wants Britain to stay in the EU.
With a month to go to the June 23 referendum, the “Remain” camp is on 55 percent and the “Leave” campaign on 45 percent, according to the What UK Thinks website’s average of the last six opinion polls.
“The Leave campaign are making a very misleading claim about Turkey. Turkey is not going to join,” Cameron said.
“They’re basically saying vote to get out of Europe because of this issue of Turkey that we can’t stop joining the EU. That is not true.
“Britain and every other country in the European Union has a veto on another country joining.
“At the current rate of progress, it would be decades, literally decades, before this even had a prospect of happening,” he said of Turkish accession.
“Even at that stage, we would be able to say no.”
Writing in the Sunday Express newspaper, Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-EU, anti-mass immigration UK Independence Party, said that to stay in the EU “would mean not just net migration at the current record high levels, but at rates even higher” in future if Turkey joined.