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EU warns Turkey: Respect democracy
28.4.2007 |
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April 28, 2007
BRUSSELS, Belgium , -- The European Union
warned Turkey's military on Saturday to stay out of
politics after the General Staff said it was
watching the parliamentary election of a new
president with concern.
"It is important that the military leaves the remit
of democracy to the democratically elected
government and this is a test case if the Turkish
armed forces respect democratic secularism and the
democratic arrangement of civil-military relations,"
EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn told
reporters.
Rehn said he was studying carefully the unusually
sharp statement by military commanders and recalled
that respect for democracy was a condition of
Turkey's EU candidacy.
"The timing is rather surprising and strange," he
said on the sidelines of a Brussels Forum on
transatlantic relations. "It's important that the
military respects also the rules of the democratic
game and its own role in that democratic game."
The powerful General Staff, which has intervened
four times in the last 50 years to topple
governments, issued its statement hours after an
inconclusive first round of voting split Turkish
secularists and the Islamist-rooted government.
Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a moderate from the
ruling AK Party with Islamist roots, failed to win
sufficient support in the first ballot and the
secular nationalist opposition applied to the
constitutional court to annul the poll.
"The Turkish armed forces are watching this
(election) situation with concern," the General
Staff said, reminding politicians that the military
was the ultimate defender of secularism.
Rehn said secular democracy held a very high value
for the European Union and was the core of Turkey's
"Europeanization project", dear also to the military
and to followers of the founder of the modern
Turkish republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Turkey, a secular state with an overwhelmingly
Muslim population, began negotiations to join the
27-nation EU in 2005 but has made only slow
progress, partly due to an unresolved dispute over
the divided island of Cyprus.
One of the key criteria for EU membership is
civilian control over the armed forces.
Rows over trade with EU member Cyprus and statements
by senior figures in some West European countries
opposing Turkish membership of the bloc has
diminished Brussels' influence over Turkey, analysts
say.
Turkish media reported the late-night military
statement mostly without comment on Saturday.
But one commentator, Bilal Cetin in Vatan daily,
called it "a final warning by the Turkish armed
forces to the government after they ignored warnings
on education (trying to ease curbs on graduates from
Muslim cleric vocational schools entering
university) and the presidential elections."
The General Staff statement contained what some
European analysts said read like a veiled threat of
possible intervention, but not as outright as the
verbal broadside that toppled Islamist Prime
Minister Necmettin Erbakan in 1997.
"Recently the main issue emerging in connection with
the presidential election has focused on a debate
over secularism. This is viewed with concern by the
Turkish armed forces," it said.
"It should not be forgotten that the Turkish armed
forces are partial in this debate and are a staunch
defender of secularism.
"The Turkish armed forces are against those debates
(questioning secularism)... and will display its
position and attitudes when it becomes necessary. No
one should doubt that."
Reuters
* First world war
massacres | Related
issue:
Armenian Genocide by Turkish Muslims against
Christians
Turkey faces international pressure to recognise
that more than 1 million Armenians were massacred
during a 1915 campaign of ethnic cleansing by
Ottoman Turks. Turkish officials claim that most
deaths were caused by hunger and disease.
*
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rejected due to its alleged political implications
by the Republic of Turkey, which does not recognize
the existence of a "Turkish Kurdistan"
Southeast Turkey. The Kurds have no rights in
Turkey.
Others estimate as many as 40 million Kurds live in
Big Kurdistan (Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Armenia),
which covers an area as big as France, about half of
all Kurds which estimate to 20 million live in
Turkey.
The Kurdish flag flown officially in Iraqi Kurdistan but
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Southeastern Turkey:
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