Erdogan raises EU issue on visit to France
Irish Times
Oct 22, 2004
PARIS: The issues that have dogged Turkey’s application for EU
membership resurfaced during a two-day visit to Paris by the Turkish
Prime Minister, Mr Recep Tayyip Erdogan writes Lara Marlowe in Paris.
Though rarely said, the main issue is that Turkey’s 70 million people
are almost all Muslim.
In the week that French schools began expelling Muslim girls who
insisted on wearing Islamic headscarves, Mr Erdogan, the leader of the
moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party, won no friends in
France by telling LCI television station that his daughters study in
the US to escape the ban on headscarves in Turkish universities.
At a press conference yesterday, Mr Erdogan tried to evade a question
from The Irish Times about article 305 of the new Turkish penal code
by saying that offences which constitute “anti-national activities”
are not specifically defined in the law. The EU demanded that Ankara
withdraw another article that would have made adultery a criminal
offence, but article 305 apparently went unnoticed.
An explanatory memorandum drawn up by the Turkish Justice Commission
provided only two examples of “anti-national activity”: demands for
the recognition of the Armenian genocide, and support for the
withdrawal of Turkish troops from Cyprus. The commission’s findings
would serve as the basis for implementing the law. “Anti-national
activity” is punishable by 10 years in prison, 15 years for publishers
and journalists.
In 1987 the European Parliament made recognition of the killing of 1.5
million Armenians in 1915, the resolution of the Cyprus and Kurdish
conflicts, and an end to human rights abuses, conditions for Turkish
accession to Europe. In 2001 the French National Assembly voted for a
law recognising the Armenian genocide.
But Mr Erdogan showed no sign of budging on the Armenian issue. “It
has never been studied on the basis of Ottoman archives,” he said. “We
say, ‘leave it up to the historians’. The archives are open. Let them
come and examine the archives in an objective fashion.” Ankara has
welcomed the work of a British historian who claims that “only”
600,000 Armenians were slaughtered by Turks, and that Turkish Muslims
were also victims.
Though Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974, Mr Erdogan said, “Turkey should
not withdraw its troops from Cyprus” because a 65 per cent majority of
Turkish Cypriots voted to accept a reunification plan drawn up by UN
Secretary General Mr Kofi Annan.
Mr Erdogan said he was “saddened” by French opposition to Turkey’s
application and objected to the holding of a referendum. He appealed
to President Jacques Chirac to stop the issue being exploited in
domestic politics.