Negotiating with Turkey over hostages

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung One German “hostage” is free, but how are we going to get the other 11 arbitrarily detained Germans out of Turkey? asked Berthold Kohler. Thanks to secret negotiations by former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, German human rights campaigner Peter Steudtner was released from a Turkish prison last week. He had been charged— preposterously—with terrorism. That a judge was suddenly willing to drop the charges and let Steudtner walk shows that Turkish justice is concerned with upholding not the law but rather the whims of authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. So what did Schröder promise Erdogan? Clearly, he didn’t convince the president of the error of imprisoning German citizens on political grounds, because Deniz Yucel, correspondent for the daily Die Welt, and others are still held. Erdogan desperately wants to get his hands on “those Turks on his purge list who fled to Germany.” Would Schröder trade them for one German? One wonders, given that the former chancellor seems willing to strike deals with despots—he was, after all, recently appointed chairman of the Russian state-controlled oil giant Rosneft. But even offering trade concessions to Turkey would have been a mistake, because that would be negotiating with hostage takers. “Germany cannot and should not get involved in Ottoman-style bartering” with people’s lives.