|
EU tells Turkish military to stay out of politics
2007-04-29
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. Turkey's secularists believe the ruling AK Party's presidential candidate, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, a former Islamist, would chip away at the secular state if elected. As president he would be commander-in-chief of the armed forces. "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," said EU Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehns. Rehn told reporters he was carefully studying the unusually sharp statement by military commanders and recalled that respect for democracy was a condition of Turkey's EU candidacy. 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 in parliament split Turkish secularists and the Islamist-rooted government. Gul, a moderate from the AK Party which has 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. The EU's German presidency said in a statement it was closely following developments in Turkey and cautioned against outside interference in the electoral process without explicitly mentioning the military. "The Presidency considers it particularly important that the elections and the Constitutional Court should not be influenced by external pressure," the statement said. "EUROPEANISATION PROJECT" Rehn said secular democracy held a very high value for the European Union and was the core of Turkey's "Europeanisation 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 in 2005 to join the 27-nation EU 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. Disputes over trade with EU member Cyprus and statements by senior figures in some West European countries opposing Turkish membership of the bloc had 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 the Vatan newspaper, 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 was not as outright as the verbal broadside that toppled Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan in 1997. (additional reporting by Gareth Jones in Ankara)
| 
