EU should show political maturity and fast-track accession of Turkey

If the EU had shown ‘political maturity’ more than a decade ago, we would have a bond with the Islamic world which would help hobble Islamic extremism, writes Victoria White

THE 39 who lost their lives in the New Year’s Eve Isis attack in the Reina nightclub in Istanbul came from 14 different nations. They were dancing the night away above the sparkling Bosphorus when the gunman burst in and unleashed his murderous hatred.

Isis is attacking Turkey where it is at its most diverse and cosmopolitian, in the hotels and night-clubs of its chichi neighbourhoods. It was a horrific start to a year which will doubtless see more atrocities before it’s out. But at least it makes some things clear. The so-called Islamic State of Syria and Levant is attacking Erodgan’s Turkey because Turkey is part of the attack on Isis in Syria.

Get this into your heads. Turkey is not an Islamic state. Turkey is a democracy. In the last decade and more it has had great economic success and that is why President’s Erdogan’s AKP party has been returned three times.

Europe’s main problem with Turkey is that Turkey is predominantly Muslim. That is why Turkey’s accession to the EU has spent six decades on the EU’s in tray. The reviled Erdogan was on the button when he said in 2005, when Turkey was about to open formal membership accession negotiations, that the EU had a choice: “Either it will show political maturity and become a global power or it will end up a Christian club.” So which was it? The latter, of course. Austria and Germany wanted a “special relationship” with Turkey rather than membership — you know, like those lucky Turkish Gastarbeiters have, who built Germany’s economy without achieving full citizenship.

If the EU had shown “political maturity” more than a decade ago and rewarded Erdogan’s major reforms, such as the abolition of the death penalty, with a fast-track to accession to mark the centenary of the Turkish Republic in 2023, we would have a bond with the Islamic world which would help hobble Islamic extremism.

But we didn’t and the world has exploded. Turkey’s new veneer of reform has cracked under appalling pressure from within and without and the curtailment of basic freedoms — most notably the freedom to publish and broadcast — has been immense. Then last July we watched horrified as a section of the Turkish army attempted to wrest power from the people, turning their tanks and guns on their fellow-citizens and killing 179 civilians.

The West does not want an alliance of equals with Turkey but wants to control the country militarily as a border patrol. I believe that Western intelligence knew the coup was planned. You can’t tell me that the US, the biggest military power in Nato didn’t know that the second-biggest military in the alliance was about to stage a coup.

“I have been involved in coups before. They should have taken CNN Turk and closed it down in the first minutes, the radio station, social media, the internet”, commented one former CIA officer on CNN at the time. He added that whenever he had “speculated” with Turkish officers about the possibility of a coup he had been told it wasn’t going to happen. However, the Huffington Post noted the remarks in the context of the CIA’s “long history of facilitating coups in foreign countries with an eye towards advancing US geopolitical or financial interests”. It is hardly disputed that the CIA has been at least compliant with the military coups which have taken place in Turkey in modern times. Nor is this surprising when you consider Turkey’s strategic importance to the US as a bulwark against both Russia and the Arab world. But as an “eye on Russia” rather more effective than the Skibbereen Eagle, the US bases in Cyprus were indispensable. This is surely why the West did nothing and said very little when Turkey invaded the island in 1974 and sent 200,000 Greek Cypriots out of their homes forever.

There is evidence to prop up the theory that the whole invasion was an American plot to save the strategic spying bases from a takeover by Greek nationalists. Authors Brendan O’Malley and Ian Craig even found a 1964 map of a possible Turkish invasion of the island in US state papers which was remarkably close to the eventual Turkish position and left the British and US spying bases intact. But whether it was a plot or not, it is incontrovertible that the countries who had based the best intelligence systems in the world on the island must have known the Turks were coming, did nothing to stop them and have contented themselves with echoing UN resolutions ever since. It is because Erdogan represents political opposition to Turkey’s powerful army that the narrative that he is an Islamic fundamentalist dictator is so important to western interests. Though when I asked young activists from the main opposing secularist Republican Peoples’ Party if Islam was the issue for Erdogan they laughed in my face. “Money is the issue for Erdogan,” explained one of them. That made far more sense.

Though the secular opposition- backed Erdogan against the July coup, the Western media focussed almost exclusively on the “crack down” and many even have speculated that Erdogan had staged the coup to facilitate it. On RTÉ’s News at One Audrey Carville interviewed Egemen Bagis, a former chief negotiator for Erdogan’s government with the EU, who poured scorn on EU threats to cancel accession plans if government crack-down was too harsh.

“No other country has waited 60 years to join the EU,” he said. “The EU has no credibility in Turkey.” He added, “We have three million refugees and have paid all the bills for two years. The EU has not delivered on any of its promises.” Reacting to Carville’s suggestion that the post-coup crackdown could be too harsh, as had happened in Egypt, he bridled that his country could be so compared, as a member of the Council of Europe and Nato, which had served on the UN Security Council.

To reintroduce the death penalty would contravene the rules of these organisations “and make enemies of the US”, suggested Carville. Bagis’s response was a show-stopper, my favourite radio moment of 2016: “The US themselves have the death penalty.”

The death penalty has not so far been reintroduced in Turkey. The trials of those accused of plotting the coup began before Christmas. Please God they will be fair. But it is in the gift of the EU in 2017 to kick-start the normalisation process in Turkey by honouring its promise to re-open a fast-track to Turkish accession.

We need Turkey. Turkey needs us. We are likely to hear much of the clash of civilisations this year. Only an alliance of civilisations can stop it.