Jailed Kurdish Politician Urges EU to Open Doors to Turkey
ANKARA
-- A jailed former Kurdish parliamentarrian has urged senior European Union
officials to invite Turkey to start membership talks, lending support to the
Ankara government.
"The
uncertainty over the negotiations date is strengthening (EU) opponents.
Uncertainty means darkness and opponents benefit from darkness," Leyla
Zana, who has been in prison since 1994 for supporting Kurdish separatist
rebels, said in a letter.
"That
is why ... the announcement of a negotiation calendar for Turkey at the (EU's
Copenhagen) summit in December will irreversibly open Turkey's road"
towards integration with the Union, she wrote.
"Otherwise,
it could become impossible to put into practice the recent legal arrangements
and to speed up the pace of democratization," she added in the letter, a
copy of which was obtained by AFP and confirmed by Zana's lawyer Yusuf Alatas.
The
Parliament last month lifted one-time bans such as broadcasts and courses in
the Kurdish language and abolished the death penalty in peace time as part of
democracy reforms aimed at bringing Turkey closer to EU norms. Zana, a laureate
of the EU Parliament's human rights award in 1995, said the
"historical" measures had sealed "the brotherhood of Turks and
Kurds."
She sent
the letter on August 29 to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, whose
country currently chairs the EU, the European Parliament's President Pat Cox,
European Commission President Romano Prodi and enlargement commissioner Guenter
Verheugen.
Zana, a
former Parliament member, has been in jail in Ankara since 1994, serving a
15-year sentence for separatist activities in support of armed Kurdish rebels.
Turkey,
the laggard among the 13 hopeful, says its recent democratization drive has
made it eligible for membership negotiations and wants the EU to set a date for
the opening of the talks by year-end.
The EU,
however, says the passage of the reforms does not guarantee the opening of
accession talks and that legal changes must be implemented in practice.