.Turkey and the EU

NYT climbs on its high horse and tears into Austria for complicating things for Turkey. While reading the editorial I broke out laughing twice. The first time was bashing Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel for trying to play politics since the the "overwheliming majority of the Austrian public doesn't want Turkey in the EU. When was the last time NYT ripped a EUnuch head of state for playing politics for not supporting US efforts in Iraq despite public opinion? The second time I lost it was when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government was referred to as "reformist". Turkey could do a whole lot worse than Erdogan but his idea of reform is nudging Turkey away from secularism and towards Islamism.

Predictably on the WashTimes continues to be the only paper honest about the issues surrounding Turkey's efforts to join the EU:

Turkey, with 5 percent of its land mass and 10 percent of its people on the European side of the Bosporus and 95 percent of the country and 90 percent of its population in Asia Minor, wants to become a full-fledged member of the European Union. This would give EU a common border with Syria, Iraq, Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, a notion that has already given Europeans an acute attack of Turkophobia.

EU membership negotiations, scheduled to start this week, are to last 10 years. By then, Turkey's population will have increased from 71 million to 82 million, making a Muslim country the largest in the 25-nation European Union. That's why it isn't going happen. But the European players, eyes blazing with insincerity, have to convince the spectators that if the negotiations succeed, and Turkey agrees to all European demands, preconditions, codicils and 80,000 pages of EU law, membership, strongly endorsed by the U.S., will follow.

A thorny issue not discussed by WashTimes but brought up by WaPost is the Kurdish problem. The good news on this front is that the Kurds seem to be tiring of fighting and Erdogan answer to the impasse is "more democracy". Kurds are forming a new party, Democratic Society Movement. The trouble here is that instead of replacing PKK it seems to (me to) be modelling itself after Sinn Fein/IRA and Euskal Herritarrok/ETA as a political arm to a terrorist organization.