Turkey Accepts EU Membership Terms but Balks on Cyprus

The government announced Thursday that it has accepted in principle the European Union’s conditions for launching membership negotiations, but it lashed out at EU demands that it solve its long-running dispute with Greece over the divided Mediterranean island of Cyprus.

“The Cyprus problem concerns primarily the two sides on the island. Turkey has always kept its EU candidacy and the Cyprus issue apart,” government spokesman Sukru Sina Gurel said at the end of a Cabinet meeting to discuss what the EU calls an “Accession Partnership Program” for Turkey.

Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkey’s military intervened on the island in response to a coup by Greek Cypriot nationalists. The EU plan unveiled in Brussels on Wednesday says Turkey must support the United Nations’ efforts to reunite the island.

The document also calls for ending widespread torture within Turkey, lifting constitutional curbs on free speech and granting all Turks the right to educate and broadcast in their mother tongue.

But it doesn’t refer by name to Turkey’s 12 million Kurds, who continue to be denied such rights.

Turkey’s largest legal pro-Kurdish party, the People’s Democracy Party, or Hadep, said it was angered by the omission of the word “Kurd.” In a statement Thursday, Hadep described the EU’s failure to elaborate on the Kurdish problem as “a deficiency.”

But Turkey’s hawkish military is likely to be pleased by the omission. Ranking generals have in recent months voiced their opposition to granting the Kurds minority rights, insisting that doing so could lead to demands for Kurdish independence. The decision by a separatist rebel group last year to call off its 15-year-long armed campaign for an independent Kurdistan, saying it would settle for cultural autonomy instead, has failed to sway the top brass.

Western diplomats said the army must have been happy that the EU plan also made no specific reference to the military’s continued intervention in politics--long seen as a key obstacle to Turkey’s accession to the EU.

Only days before the document was released, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer was quoted by a German newspaper as saying that Turkey may never be willing to make the moves necessary to join the EU.

“Turkey today fulfills neither the economic, political nor human rights conditions for entry,” Fischer told the Leipziger Volkszeitung in an interview published Tuesday. “But if we don’t offer Turkey a European perspective, then there is a grave danger it might drift dangerously.”