EU-Turkey talks to get OK next week, but human rights still a massive issue

Date: 30/09/04

FRITS Bolkestein has warned that the victory of Christianity over Islam at the 1683 Battle of Vienna might be in vain if Turkey joins the EU.

His Austrian colleague Franz Fischler thinks Turkish accession will cost too much. And several other European commissioners have misgivings about welcoming a vast, mostly Muslim, country into the Union's fold.

Yet, barring a disaster, the EU executive will formally recommend next week (6 October) that negotiations on Turkey's membership bid should begin.

The majority view among the European Commission is that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan should be rewarded for the far-reaching reforms he has introduced since his Justice and Development (AK) Party won a landslide victory in Turkey's 2002 general election.

These have generally gone in the direction of honouring the Copenhagen criteria for EU membership.

Drawn up at a 1993 summit, the criteria state that for a country to join the Union it must have strong institutions to guarantee democracy, the rule of law, human rights and the protection of minorities, as well as an effective market economy capable of withstanding competitive pressures.

However, the Commission is still likely to convey the impression, when publishing its monitoring report on Turkey, that severe shortcomings need to be addressed, especially in the human rights field.

In a paper issued this week, the Centre for European Policy Studies and the Istanbul-based Economics and Foreign Policy Forum underscore that a quantum leap has been made in Turkey over the past few years.

For example, the question of minority rights, including the plight of the Kurds, is no longer a taboo subject, the two think-tanks note.

But they also contend that serious questions relating to torture and freedom of association still need to be addressed. It is necessary to take such steps as ensuring that policemen accused of ill-treating detainees are removed from active duty pending the results of investigations, while the powers of the interior ministry and government officials to search through the files of non-governmental organizations still have to be curtailed.

"The EU needs to be careful to follow up the implementation of these reforms," says Reyhan Yalcindag, from the Human Rights Association in Ankara. "The Turkish state is still non-democratic and military. Torture is still systematic. And the Kurdish question - the right to education in your mother tongue - is still an issue."

A spokesman for the Turkish mission to the EU challenged these allegations. "The military work under instructions from the government and the president," he said.

"Systematic torture does not exist in Turkey. The progress made by Turkey in fighting torture has been acknowledged by the European Commission, competent international authorities and responsible human rights NGOs."

Human rights lawyer Tahir Elci says that much more needs to be done to improve the lot of the Kurdish community, who are estimated to comprise 20% of the country's population. "A half-hour of broadcasting in Kurdish on TV is not enough," he says. "The government must support Kurdish culture and language in public life. But there is still no Kurdish institution in any university."

The revised penal code - approved by Turkey's parliament on Sunday (26 September) with its controversial ban on adultery removed - has been designed to improve the lot of Turkish women. For example, it outlaws one of the facets of Turkish society to prove most unpalatable in western Europe - the so-called honour killings against women accused of disobeying their families.

While this step has been broadly welcomed, an uphill struggle still lies ahead to better the lives of women, especially outside the more westernized parts of the country, such as Istanbul.

Almost 95% of all honour killings take place in the south and south-east of the country, where the rate of suicide among women - frequently to escape from arranged marriages - is also twice as high as in the rest of Turkey.

A new report from KA-DER (the Association for Support and Training of Women Candidates) describes the high rate of female illiteracy as "a nagging issue in Turkey".

Nationally up to 15% of women may not be able to read or write, it suggests, stating that the highest rates of illiteracy are in the south-east (39%), eastern Anatolia and the Black Sea region (both 21%). Of the 65 million girls not attending school throughout the world, 600,000 of them live in Turkey.

Economically, Turkey appears to have partially recovered from the financial crisis that beset it in February 2001. Blamed by some analysts on the populist and corrupt politics pursued in Turkey during the 1990s, this crisis shaved 7.5% off national income and resulted in interest rates rising by 400%. Reforms overseen by the International Monetary Fund have been credited with a subsequent economic growth rate of 7% and with allowing the Turkish lira to retrieve its value.

But as Heather Grabbe, from the Centre for European Reform notes: "Turkey's economy remains fragile, highly indebted and dangerously dependent on the inflow of short-term money."

Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler has predicted that Turkish membership could see the Union's current farm support budget of €56 billion rise by €11.3bn per year.

Turkey's 72 million people are poorer on average than those in any of the current EU-25. And the percentage of people working on the land is higher even than in Poland, the most agricultural country in the Union.

But the analysis from the Centre for European Policy Studies and the Economics and Policy Forum indicates that Fischler's fears may be exaggerated. This states that impoverished countries "cause fewer problems than widely anticipated" when they join the EU. "Experience has shown that problems are much more likely to arise from established rich member countries with stagnant economies (Belgium in the 1980s, Italy and Germany today) than from poorer but more dynamic states (Spain and Greece in the recent past, Hungary and other central and eastern European countries) today," it states.

The paper also calculates that the costs of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) will be reined in because of commitments made at the World Trade Organization to reduce trade-distorting subsidies. So they calculate that, should Turkey join the Union in 2015, it can expect to pay €2bn into the EU budget and receive ten times as much back.

Even if the CAP remains unreformed, they estimate that the €9bn Turkey draws from it will be equivalent to 0.08% of the Union's overall gross domestic product (GDP). The country would also be eligible to €8bn from the Union's structural funds under the terms set at the 1999 Berlin Summit if its current GDP of €200bn remains the same.

EU leaders at that meeting decided to cap structural fund allocations at 4% of a country's GDP.

One argument that opponents of Turkey's EU entry have used is that the country is simply too big. Expected to reach 80 million in 2015, its population would be around the same as that of Germany, the largest current EU state.

Earlier this month a group, including former French premier Michel Rocard, former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari and ex-European commissioner Emma Bonino, concluded that the new voting weights for the Council of Ministers foreseen in the EU constitution could give Turkey considerable leverage.

Ankara would have a significant influence if a 'blocking minority' were being pieced together among a group of member states on a specific proposal.

To allay fears about Islam becoming dominant in Europe by the end of this century, the report contends that the separation of religion and state on which the founder of modern Turkey Kemal Ataturk insisted remains solid. The group cites a 2000 study stating that, while the majority of Turks consider themselves to be pious Muslims, they do not believe religion should encroach into politics.

Author examines 'informed' views on Turkey across the European Union, including the European Commission, think tanks and NGOs.