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Turkish complexities confound EU - by Jody Sabral
The EU has very high expectations of Ankara, but does not really comprehend its complexities, says Ibrahim Gunel, a columnist at the Turkish daily Radikal.
Turkey's majority Muslim composition and its secular democracy make it a unique country, he says.
The Commission's 2006 report describes the prosecutions and convictions for the expression of non-violent opinion as "a cause for serious concern", while noting that the Turkish Grand National Assembly adopted 148 laws of a total 429 draft bills submitted since October 2005.
The Commission's 2006 report, while crediting Turkey for reform in the area of civil-military relations, says that overall "limited progress" had been made in aligning civil-military relations with EU practices. To understand Turkey's relationship with the military is to understand the very foundations of the modern republic. Turkey is a 99.8% per cent Muslim country, but operates as a secular state with religion kept strictly out of politics.
"Curiously, the most contentious issue in EU-Turkey relations may lie outside the country's borders in Cyprus. Most Turks are tired of hearing about the Cyprus issue as they believe that it is just a sticking point that the EU uses to thwart Turkey's struggle to be accepted. "According to the Nice Convention [one of the founding principles of the EU], Cyprus should not even really be a member of the EU as it quite clearly states if a country has a border problem it can not be accepted as an EU member," Gunel says.
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