Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-12-13-Speech-1-066"
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"en.20041213.10.1-066"2
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".
Mr President, in order, right at the start, to comply with Mr Schulz’s demand for a nuanced approach, let me make it clear that my group will, on the one hand, vote by a large majority for the commencement of negotiations with Turkey and will expressly endorse what is set out in the report, namely that these negotiations should have Turkish membership of the EU as their objective, but that we do, on the other hand, have serious problems with the report itself.
This is no fault of Mr Eurlings, who has struck me as being very competent and committed in this matter. I have to say, though, and with regret, that I am both disappointed and surprised that – of all people – the Socialist Group in the European Parliament and the Group of the Greens, on all the practical issues in which the negotiation process could have measured further progress in terms of time and impact, have rejected amendments to that effect. The report we have before us is balanced in its criticisms, but those criticisms are metaphilosophical and so generalised that we can hardly get to grips with them.
Whilst we acknowledge that Turkey has seen considerable positive changes in both the political and legal spheres over the past two years, it must actually be possible to expand on the fact that the reality is often rather different. In a report that twice, and rightly, addresses the problem of the Greek Orthodox seminary at Halki, it must also be possible to address the issue of the four million Kurds who are refugees in a country in which over four thousand villages have been destroyed. In contrast to other issues, these things have not been specifically mentioned in this report, and I suspect that this has been done in order to avoid providing opponents of Turkish accession with ammunition. Yet Mrs Bonino has drawn attention to the problem that these thorny issues touch upon the substance, the presuppositions, and the potential value of the principles on the basis of which the European Union exists, and I believe this, tactically speaking, to be quite the wrong road to take. My group will have no part in this sort of relativism. We will take the negotiating process as an opportunity to further set out those things that – as I have learned from other Members – are the necessary practical details of what Socialists and Greens have long demanded.
With fellow Members of this House, I visited the small Kurdish town of Kiziltepe, where, on 21 November, a lorry driver and his twelve-year old son were shot dead. The governor announced that two armed terrorists had been killed. In any EU Member State, a governor would have had to step down for that. That is the standard we will continue to apply.
I want to conclude by saying something else. We will not allow Turkey to gain, rather than a privileged partnership, the discriminatory membership that the Commission envisages."@en1
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