E.u. : Turkey Not Fit For Membership

[Aratta-Kingdom]

http://www.dailytexanonline.com/media/pape...p-1014864.shtml

 

 

TURKEY NOT FIT FOR MEMBERSHIP

By Matthew Nickson

 

Daily Texan, TX

Oct 10 2005

 

Last Monday at a ministerial conference in Luxembourg, the foreign

ministers of the European Union agreed to begin membership talks with

Turkey. The decision to open "adhesion negotiations" - taken after

overcoming an Austrian counter-proposal for a "privileged partnership"

- is a blow to the democratic goals of a unified Europe.

 

Since joining the European Economic Community as an associate member

in 1963, Turkey has consistently professed its reformist credentials,

eager to counter the world community's outdated image of a thinly

veiled military dictatorship. But time and again - despite progress

in certain areas outlined in the 1993 Copenhagen Criteria for EU

expansion - the Turkish government has shown it is either unwilling

or unable to fully democratize and modernize. In its own country,

Turkey continues to systematically restrict freedom of expression and

oppress its minority Kurdish population. Abroad, Turkey maintains an

ever belligerent posture toward its neighbors, particularly Armenia

and Cyprus.

 

The latest example of Turkish repression came last Friday, when

a Turkish administrative court convicted an Armenian journalist,

Hrant Dink, of insulting the "Turkish identity" by writing about

the Armenian genocide. During World War I, the Ottoman Army and

its guerilla auxiliaries massacred more than one million Armenians

who refused to convert from Christianity to Islam. To this day, the

Turkish government illegalizes practically any admission of Turkish

guilt and threatens or imprisons individuals who speak out.

 

Nationalist officials trivialize the massacres as tragic but

inevitable consequences of war, or dismiss the Armenians as pro-Russian

traitors. Although Armenia is a small, underdeveloped country, Turkey

continues to blockade it by land, cutting off road and rail traffic.

 

Ironically - and in a sign of the Turkish court system's perversity

- Dink was tried and convicted for writing that Armenians should

rid themselves of anti-Turkish anger. The court implied from his

admonition that Dink - who received a suspended six month sentence -

was somehow deriding the Turkish blood.

 

The fact is, unlike many former European colonizers, Turkey has

made few if any efforts to atone for its imperialist past. The Turks

have been unable, notwithstanding decades of co-membership in NATO,

to arrive at a truly permanent peace with Greece. As late as 1996,

the two countries nearly fought a war over the Imia islands in the

Aegean Sea. Furthermore, the Turkish government adamantly refuses to

recognize the independence of the Greek portion of Cyprus and the

sovereignty of the government in Nicosia. Although Turkey signed

a July 29 protocol extending its customs union with the European

Union to the 10 members admitted in 2004 - among them the Republic

of Cyprus - Turkey obstinately refuses to open its ports and airports

to Cypriot commerce.

 

Turkey also has a bad track record with its Middle Eastern neighbors.

 

The country has consistently been accused by Syria and Iraq of

siphoning an inordinate amount of water from the Euphrates River,

which Turkey has diverted for a massive - and environmentally risky

- development project involving the construction of 22 dams and 19

power plants.

 

The Southeast Anatolia Development Project has been touted as an

economic boon for Turkey's minority Kurdish population. Yet Turkey

has engaged in a long-standing policy of political and cultural

warfare against the Kurds who live in southeastern Turkey, near the

Iraqi border by imprisoning Kurdish political figures and limiting

classroom instruction in Kurdish. As recently as the early 1990s,

Turkey conducted a Central American-style scorched earth campaign

against Kurdish villages suspected of harboring separatist guerillas,

killing as many as 30,000 people.

 

All the foregoing is not to deny that Turkey has enacted reforms

in its quest for EU membership. The country has abolished the death

penalty and retreated from its once total censure of Kurdish culture.

 

In the economic realm, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has

repealed subsidies favoring the textile industry. If admitted to the

EU, Turkey holds out the promise of revitalizing laggard European

economies with its growing consumer market, cheap labor (an augury

of massive emigration) and increased trade.

 

But Turkey's reforms are too little, and Turkish society has evolved

insufficiently since 1963. Treacherous fault lines still haunt the

political landscape, with Islamic fundamentalists on one extreme and

a military clique on the other, ever ready to intervene to defend

the ideological vision of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

 

The bottom line is that Turkey absolutely does not deserve an EU seat

alongside progressive, democratic nations like France, Great Britain,

Germany and Spain.

 

Nickson is a third year law student and executive editor of The Texas

International Law Journal.