BBC World – AB Müzakere Çerçeve Belgesi (İng.)

Genel Başkan Yardımcısı Onur ÖYMEN’in BBC World televizyonuna verdiği mülakat
30 Eylül 2005
Well, to say the truth the Turkish people are somehow disappointed. Because until now we were told that we have to do some reforms to fullfil the conditions of the EU criteria and start enlargement talks to become a full member.

Of course not. We have so far no document with EU concluded which has refernce to privileged partnership and so far there is no privileged partner of EU. We have conducted all our policies and organized our state reforms as for the purpose of full membership. Special status or privileged partnership is not accepteble and nobody in Turkey, no political party, no politician is in favour of that.

The real difference is that the issue of privileged partner means that we are not in the decision making system of the EU. Therefore it is not acceptabel and it is a non starter for Turkey and we are not prepared even to negotiate. Therefore we are so much disappointed that some countries are trying to blok the start of enlargemnent for our purpose. The language used by the EU so far is very much different from the language used for other countries.

For instance, EU is requesting from Turkey the recognition of Southern Cyprus as the Republic of Cyprus which will be a contridiction because the same Union has asked us to contribute to UN effort to reshape Cyprus and establish a bicominal state.

This will be a simplistic  approach because Cyprus is not like any other country. Cyprus was built as bicominal state. Now they kicked out the Turks from the government. So it is actually an only Greek support state. And they asked us to forget about the founding agreements of Cyprus and recognize the Greek administration as the official Republic of Cyprus which is totally unacceptable for Turkey.