‘European Commission is working to avoid a train crash at the end of the year’
RELATIONS BETWEEN the European Union and Turkey face turbulence later this year over Cyprus and it will take deft diplomacy to avoid a “train crash”, EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said yesterday.
The EU has said Turkey, with which it began membership talks last October, must open its ports and airports to traffic from Cyprus this year under an agreement extending its customs union to the 10 new countries that joined the 25-nation bloc in 2004.
Turkey has so far refused, linking the issue to an ending of an economic blockade of the Turkish-occupied north, which the government has prevented Brussels from easing.
“We may face a period of political tension in EU-Turkey relations,” Rehn told Reuters in an interview.
“The (European) Commission is working to avoid a train crash at the end of the year. The Finnish presidency will have to use all its diplomatic skills, inherited from the period of neutrality policy, to avoid this train crash.”
Finland will hold the EU’s rotating presidency in the second half of this year.
Rehn said the Commission, the EU’s executive arm, had recommended opening the first detailed accession negotiations with Ankara on education, culture, science and research and it was now up to member states to agree a mandate.
In parallel with that process, Turkey had a timeline for abiding by its commitments under the so-called Ankara Protocol to its EU customs union, and the Commission would assess progress “in the course of 2006”.
“The sooner Turkey will open the ports and fully implement the protocol, the better. But we will have to present our assessment in the course of this year,” he said.
Rehn acknowledged that the decision to begin talks with Turkey, a sprawling, poor country on the southeast edge of Europe with a mainly Muslim population of more than 70 million, had sharpened debate in the EU about the limits of expansion and the bloc’s capacity to absorb newcomers.
A majority of EU citizens polled for the Commission’s regular Eurobarometer opinion surveys oppose Turkish membership, with up to 80 per cent against in current EU president Austria.
But Rehn said the crisis in the Muslim world over cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad published in European newspapers had shown just how valuable a bridge Turkey could be.
“I wonder if there is still anybody in Europe who questions the strategic value of opening the accession negotiations with Turkey after what we have seen in the cartoon crisis and in the wider Middle East,” he said.
“I felt much better having (Turkish Foreign Minister) Abdullah Gul sitting next to me in Salzburg giving a very sensible and balanced intervention on European values including freedom of expression and respect of religious beliefs, than having a Turkish foreign minister agitating his troops in the streets of Ankara or Diyarbakir,” he added.
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