Roj Bash Kurdistan

Erdogan rebuffs EU on terrorism law

In an impassioned speech to party faithful Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan slammed the European Union on Friday (May 6) saying his country would not change terrorism laws to suit the requirements of a migration deal.

"When Turkey is under attack from terrorist organizations and powers that support them directly, or indirectly, the European Union is telling us: 'You should change the law on terrorism for the visa-free agreement," Erdogan said. "They say 'I am going to abolish visas and this is the condition. I am sorry, we are going our way, you go yours. Agree with whoever you can agree," he added.

His fiery speech will be a blow to any hope in European capitals that it might be business as usual with Turkey after Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu. The outgoing PM who had negotiated the migration deal with Europe and had largely delivered on Turkey's commitments so far, announced he was standing down.

The EU asked member states on Wednesday (May 4) to grant visa-free travel to Turks in return for Ankara stopping migrants reaching Europe, but said Turkey still had to change some laws first, including bringing its terrorism laws in line with EU standards.

Erdogan is aware that visa-free travel is for many Turks the biggest benefit of Ankara's deal with the EU.

Davutoglu's departure consolidates the power of Erdogan, who has been highly critical of the EU in the past and who is seen in Brussels as a far tougher negotiating partner less closely wedded to Turkey's ambition of joining the EU in recent years.

To win visa-free travel, Turkey must still meet five of 72 criteria the EU imposes on all states exempt from visas, one of which is narrowing its legal definition of terrorism.

Rights groups say Turkey has used broad anti-terrorism laws to silence dissent, including detaining journalists and academics critical of the government. But Ankara insists the laws are essential as it battles the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) at home and the threat from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in neighboring Syria and Iraq.

A German government spokesman said Berlin expects Turkey to uphold the deal, which was pushed by Chancellor Angela Merkel and which she hopes will shore up support for her conservatives ahead of a federal election next year.

http://www.nrttv.com/EN/Details.aspx?Jimare=6675

Berat Albayrak to be Prime Minister of Turkey

Not yet official but extremely lightly

Berat Albayrak is married to Erdogan's eldest daughter Esra and has been serving as Energy Minister for the past few months

Turkey's Erdogan pours cold water on hopes of progress on EU deal

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday poured more cold water on hopes for progress with Europe on a deal to curb migration, suggesting Ankara would not change its anti-terrorism laws just to meet European Union requirements.

The EU has asked member states to grant visa-free travel to Turks in return for Ankara stopping migrants from reaching Europe, but said Turkey still had to change some legislation, including bringing its terrorism laws in line with EU standards.

The migrant deal between Brussels and Ankara was negotiated by Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who this week announced his decision to step down as premier, capping weeks of public tension with Erdogan.

"Those who ask Turkey to change its laws on terror should first remove the terrorists' tents that were erected outside the EU parliament," Erdogan said in a speech to supporters in the eastern Anatolian city of Matalya.

He was referring to Belgian authorities allowing supporters of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) to set up a protest site outside an EU-Turkey summit in March.

Visa-free travel is for many Turks the biggest benefit of Ankara's deal with the EU. Europe, meanwhile, is counting on Turkey to maintain an agreement that has helped stem the flow of refugees and migrants via Turkish shores.

Davutoglu's departure consolidates the power of Erdogan, who has been highly critical of the EU in the past and is seen in Brussels as a far tougher negotiating partner less closely wedded in recent years to Turkey's ambition of joining the EU.

To win visa-free travel for its citizens, Turkey must still meet five of 72 criteria the EU imposes on all states exempt from visas, one of which is narrowing its legal definition of terrorism.

Rights groups say Turkey has used broad anti-terrorism laws to silence dissent, including detaining journalists and academics critical of the government. But Ankara insists the laws are essential as it battles Kurdish militants at home and the threat from Islamic State in neighboring Syria and Iraq.

Erdogan has frequently accused the West of not giving enough support to Turkey for sheltering more than 2.5 million refugees since the start of the Syrian civil war. He has also been infuriated by Western support for Syrian Kurdish militants in the fight against Islamic State.

Turkey, a NATO member and part of the U.S.-led coalition against the militant Islamist group, regards the Washington-backed Syrian Kurdish fighters as an extension of the PKK, which has waged an armed struggle against the Turkish state that left more than 40,000 dead since 1984.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-europ ... SKCN0XY0GT

Turkey's President Erdogan is not a nice man

We should resist him rather than pander to him

Sometimes the cultural gap between allies can be bigger than you think. The other day, Chancellor Angela Merkel gave permission for a prosecution to be brought against a young comedian called Jan Böhmermann who had recited a rude poem on state television. His verses fantasised that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey indulges in what used to be called “unnatural practices”. I don’t speak German, and am not a student of that rare genre, the German joke, but I am told the word “goat” may have been involved.

Mr Böhmermann is to be prosecuted under article 103 of the German Criminal Code. Beneath the heading “Defamation of organs and representatives of foreign states”, that article says: “Whoever insults a foreign head of state… shall be liable to imprisonment not exceeding three years or a fine.”

We think of Germany as being quite like us these days, but is it imaginable that Britain – which does not, in the same formal sense, possess a criminal code – would have such a rule? In this country, making rude jokes about foreign leaders and their organs, far from being illegal, is virtually compulsory. The immediate response of The Spectator was to announce a “President Erdogan Offensive Poetry Competition”, whose only rules are that entries that are non-obscene and non-defamatory will not be considered. The results are eagerly awaited.

But in Germany, the law seems to be an offshoot of diplomacy. Mrs Merkel stated publicly that Turkey is “a country which works very closely with Germany on the basis of friendship”. So she told the courts to go ahead and prosecute Mr Böhmermann.

Since he became president of his country in 2014 (after many years as its prime minister), Mr Erdogan has taken advantage of his position to sue or arrest at least 1,845 Turks, including a 13-year-old boy, for insulting him. Now, thanks to the German Chancellor, he is starting to export this practice into the European Union.

It is time to resist. First, because Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not a nice man. He is – it almost goes without saying these days – a serious anti-Semite, who, in best Ken Livingstone mode, says, “Just like Hitler, who sought to establish a race free of all faults, Israel is chasing after the same target.”

Erdogan closes down newspapers and jails political opponents. He supports Islamist extremists in other states, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He has built himself a presidential palace in Ankara which cost €270 million. He removed the colossal Statue of Humanity, which had been erected in Kars to symbolise reconciliation between Turks and Armenians for the former’s massacre of the latter.

He has re-Islamised a firmly secular polity. He purveys Ottoman rhetoric and plays out pseudo-Ottoman ceremonies, as if he were the new Sultan. He speaks of the return of Turkish military power. When he went to Germany in 2011, he addressed large crowds of Turkish immigrants living there, boasting “Now Turkey will at last start building its own war planes.” He urged his audience not to assimilate. This week, he pushed out his prime minister for showing a smidgeon of doubt about his ever-increasing power.

Second, we should resist because this business of trying to criminalise insult is one of the most active global campaigns of Muslim militants. They detest the very idea of “living with difference” on which modern plural societies depend. In their sharia, a joke is little short of a blasphemy. They constantly try to get non-Muslim countries to pass laws which make it an offence to attack their prophet or their religion, or even their big cheeses.

We must not get into a situation where, just because Mr Erdogan is the militant, moustachioed Muslim leader of an important Muslim country, we have to kneel before him and never mention him in any sort of connection with goats.

The third and most important reason we should insult Mr Erdogan and be really quite rude even to nice Mrs Merkel is that he – thanks in part, to her – is now able to hold Europe to ransom.

The EU, having proved itself incapable of controlling the flow of Middle East migrants across its borders, has decided to outsource the job to Turkey. Naturally, Mr Erdogan’s price is high. It is €3 billion (pretty much unsupervised) to get going, and automatic travel rights into the Schengen area of the EU for his country’s 78.7 million citizens.

He also demands that the EU stop harassing him about his human rights record and failure to conform with Western democratic norms – hence Mrs Merkel’s deference to his wounded vanity. His longer-term price is Turkish membership of the EU, which he has sought for many years.

The position the EU has granted him gives him the power to turn on and off the tap of Syrian refugees to Europe when he feels like it. As he himself put it in February, “We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria any time and we can put refugees on buses.” The nastier he gets, therefore, the more he gets.

When we voted to stay in the EEC in 1975, who, even among sceptics, would have thought that the future of the Union would rest on what happens outside Europe? Who would have imagined that the security and future composition of the Union would be put into in the hands of the anti-Western Muslim autocrat of a mainly Asian power? Yet now it is so. This would-be Caliph, this Putin with the Koran, is now in charge of Europe’s supply of Muslims.

Erdogan’s “Europe” takes us to the border of Syria and Iraq. It makes the politics of there the politics of here. Even in Britain, one of the countries furthest geographically from this theatre of conflict, we shall see the effects. Watch closely how the new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, plays the ethnic and religious politics which result.

One European response is to say that it just proves how we need “more Europe”: if only the EU had more overall power and less internal squabbling then it could maintain its own borders. In theory, perhaps, this is true, but experience is telling us that the EU is, by its constitution and because of its sprawling size, a system of bureaucratic regulation, but not a system of democratic, decision-making government whose citizens can believe in it.

The historic irony of all this is that there is one great nation within the EU system which gains more and more power because of the way it works. This is Germany, the nation which the whole thing was designed to contain. It is Germany which decides the policy of the euro, condemning southern eurozone members to austerity and unemployment.

It was Mrs Merkel who unilaterally invited more than a million Middle-Eastern refugees into her country, thereby putting huge strain on the whole Schengen system. And now it is Germany, with its long-standing, close links with Turkey, which is shaping the future demography of Europe.

No one doubts Mrs Merkel’s good intentions, but is it against Article 103 of her country’s criminal code to suggest that she might be paving the road to Hell?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05 ... esist-him/