• =?UTF-8?Q?Turkey=E2=80=99s_EU_dream_is_over=2C_for_now=2C_top_EU_offici

    From vuraltkorkmaz@gmail.com@21:1/5 to All on Tue May 2 09:34:34 2017
    http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkeys-eu-dream-is-over-for-now-top-eu-official-says.aspx?pageID=238&nID=112638&NewsCatID=351

    Tuesday,May 2 2017

    Turkey’s EU dream is over, for now, top EU official says

    VALLETTA – Reuters


    Turkey has turned its back on joining the European Union, at least for now, the bloc’s top official dealing with Ankara said, offering economic cooperation instead if both sides can restore friendly ties.

    After years of stalemate on Turkey’s bid to join the world’s biggest trading bloc, EU governments say the process is dead, citing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s crackdown on dissidents, his “Nazi” jibes at Germany and a referendum giving him
    sweeping new powers that a rights group says lack checks and balances.

    “Everybody’s clear that, currently at least, Turkey is moving away from a European perspective,” European Commissioner Johannes Hahn, who oversees EU membership bids, told Reuters.

    “The focus of our relationship has to be something else,” he said in an interview after EU foreign ministers met in Malta and where France and Germany led efforts to consider a new deal with Ankara based on trade and security ties.

    “We have to see what could be done in the future, to see if we can restart some kind of cooperation,” Hahn said on April 29, saying that he had not had meetings on the economy with NATO-member Turkey since January last year, normally a fixture of
    accession talks.

    The EU process is not formally frozen, but EU lawmakers called last week for a formal halt to talks, with some saying Turkey no longer met the democratic criteria to be considered a candidate, let alone a full member, for the EU.

    Erdoğan told Reuters in an interview last week that Turkey would not wait at Europe’s door forever and would walk away from accession talks if what he said was rising Islamophobia and hostility from some member states persist.

    Launched in 2005 after decades of seeking the formal start of an EU membership bid, negotiations dovetailed with Erdoğan’s first economic reforms in power as prime minister from 2003.

    The European Union is Turkey’s biggest foreign investor and biggest trading partner, while Turkey shares a border with Iraq, Syria and with Russia in the Black Sea.

    Hahn said he would present a report by early next year to EU governments to clarify Turkey’s status. The lack of urgency shows the reluctance of EU states to upset Ankara, given that they rely on Turkey to keep migrants from coming to Europe, diplomats
    said.

    But Hahn said that limits on with press freedoms, mass jailing and shrinking civil rights made it almost impossible at the present time for Turkey to meet EU joining criteria.

    Hahn said EU rules “were not negotiable” and the bloc would not “decouple the human rights situation” from discussions.

    “There is no version of Turkish democracy. There is only democracy. Turkish people have the same rights to live in freedom as Europeans do,” said Hahn, whose delegation in Turkey has visited suspects in prison.

    A slim majority of 51.4 percent of Turkish voters voted in April to grant the president sweeping new powers, the biggest overhaul of the country’s politics since the founding of the modern republic.

    Asked if the European Union was partly responsible for Turkey’s turn towards a more centralized system, Hahn said the drive to change had come from inside the country.

    “Nobody can claim to be blameless, but it is always the sovereign decision of a country [to decide policy] ... If you have a certain vision in mind, it is difficult to intervene in a meaningful way,” Hahn said.

    “All these reform efforts are not done for the European Union but for the sake of [Turkish] citizens,” Hahn said, referring to the process that helped transform former communist countries in central and eastern Europe into thriving market democracies
    as they sought to join the European Union.

    “This is not about serving the Europeans,” he said.

    May/02/2017

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  • From vuraltkorkmaz@gmail.com@21:1/5 to All on Tue May 2 09:35:29 2017
    Turkiye’s EU membership attempt was born dead. Turkiye is a secular country with majority of its population is moderate Moslem; may be not a perfect secularism, but better than fake Christians countries of Europe.

    European countries are direct descendants of savage Romans with fragmented and mostly fake Christians traditionally at each others’ throats and harboring a lot of racist elements while with some good but ineffective support for human rights. Look at
    the carnage that massacred tens of thousands of innocent Moslems by fake Christians in the Balkans in 1990s while the entire Europe stood by and watched. Look at the migrant crisis and Europe's do-nothing attitude while at least 500 thousand innocent
    people were massacred. After all Europe created the entire Middle East and Northern African countries after WWI with millions of Ottoman Turks massacred. There is very few real Christians in Europe; mostly fake, greedy, jealous and hateful against fellow
    human beings and against each other.

    Pope, (once the largest land and slave owner in Europe) and other fake Christians go around the world promote their fake and archaic religion (not real Christian) which has caused nothing but immense sufferings in Europe and the world throughout its
    history, still requiring population explosions with unlimited birth rate only to cause more and more poverty.

    UK is out of EU, busy with final preparations. France wants to get out if Le Pen is elected. If EU were so good, why then UK and French want to get out. Therefore, UE is coming to its end anyway.

    Turkiye should have never wanted to join EU anyway. EU is nothing but a propaganda of European un-civilization, greed, jealousy and hatred, and fake Christianity.

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