even een rondje opinies en nieuwtjes..
ISTANBUL, Dec 14 (AFP) - Movie director Oliver Stone, in Istanbul promoting his new blockbuster "Alexander," took the chance Tuesday to try to make peace with Turkey, where he has been vilified as the man who tarnished the country's image with his screenplay for the classic "Midnight Express."
"I never intended it to be against Turkey," Stone told AFP in an interview here, "it was against injustice... everywhere
ANKARA, Dec 14 (AFP) - The 20 percent of Turks who oppose their country's European ambitions may speak on the issue with one voice but they come from both extremes of the country's political spectrum.
"There is no reason for Turkey to become a part of the European Union -- it can only become a province or a colony of Europe," argues Dogu Perincek, a veteran Maoist militant and president of the Workers' Party (IP).
His far-left group, which has no parliamentary representation, is fiercely anti-EU, but, Perincek adds, "not anti-Europe."
The same message can be heard from the other end of the political spectrum.
"It will mean the end of the Turkish Republic as we know it," warns Mehmet Sandir, vice president of the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP). "It will be something completely different," he told AFP.
Perincek believes that Turkey, a Muslim-majority nation of more than 70 million people, "must keep its head high" and not be subjugated by EU countries whose leaders, Ankara hopes, will invite it to start membership talks at the end of thir Brussels summit Friday.
Perincek maintains that Turkey, which has accumulated tens of billions of dollars (euros) in debt over the past decades, is paying the price for having erred from the path of Kemalism -- the teachings of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
He advocates an immediate return to the policies of the leader who, in 1923, proclaimed the westernized, secular republic built on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.
"The EU is a sucker's market," Perincek said in a recent interview with AFP, accusing Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of "lying" to the people about the benefits of joining the bloc.
In any case, he added, Europe does not want Turkey, which is why European leaders keep imposing new, unprecedented conditions for the start of membership talks to delay a membership strongly opposed by European public opinion.
No matter what it does, he said, and whatever price it is prepared to pay, Turkey will never become a member of "the rich man's club."
The right-wing Sandir would agree.
"We must immediately break off the integration process into the EU," he argues.
His MHP was part of Turkey's previous left-right coalition led by Bulent Ecevit, but is now out of parliament, having failed in the 2002 election to obtain the minimum 10 percent of votes required to get a seat in the assmbly.
Turkey's current bid to join the EU will only "sow the seeds of hate" between Turks and Europeans, Sandir said, because the EU demands, particularly concerning minority rights, are unacceptable.
The former MP said his party favors a "dignified" entry into the European bloc, with no concessions from Turkey's ancestral and religious values.
To follow the EU lead and consider Kurds and Alevis -- a progressive Muslim community that accounts for about one-fifth of the country's population -- as minorities will be the death knell of a united Turkey, he predicted.
Turkey, whose population is 99 percent Muslim, goes by the letter of the 1923 Lausanne agreement, which, as it laid the international foundations of the new Turkish republic, recognized only non-Muslim communities such as Jews and Christians as minorities.
The IP and the MHP are the most prominent of a bevy of political parties, associations and non-government organisations across the political spectrum that oppose Turkey's EU membership for a variety of reasons.
"Most people don't even know what the EU is," said Havva Sezgin, a student and a militant of left-wing group opposed to Turkey's European ambitions. "They are victims of a media assault and are totally confused."
She added: "And even if we do join in 20 or 25 years, the EU by then will no longer have any political or economic reason to exist."
BERLIN, Dec 14 (AFP) - Turkey's bid to become the first predominantly Muslim country to gain membership of the European Union has sparked a wider debate about integrating immigrants into European countries.
Nowhere has that debate been more intense than in the Netherlands, where a 26-year-old Muslim has been arrested and charged with killing controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in November.
The brutal killing of the man whose films were openly critical of the Islamic faith sparked a short-lived but violent series of attacks on mosques and Islamic schools and led to cracks appearing in the traditionally liberal Dutch approach to immigration.
Ninety percent of respondents to one survey a week after the murder said they felt less tolerant than before and 80 percent said the Netherlands should tighten its policy on immigration.
The Dutch government however backs Turkey's membership bid and Foreign Minister Ben Bot has said it is "realistic" to expect Turkey to become a full member by 2015.
With 2.8 million Turks among the 3.5 million Muslims living in Germany, Turkey's attempt to enter the EU is a hot topic here.
While the government has thrown its support behind Turkey's bid, the events surrounding the van Gogh murder across the border have thrown into sharp focus the problems Germany has in integrating its own Muslim immigrants.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has spoken of "parallel societies" emerging, a claim backed up, for example, by a recent survey by the OECD which shows that children born in Germany to immigrant parents perform worse at school than children born abroad who immigrate.
Interior Minister Otto Schily has bemoaned his country's "naive multi-culturalism" of the past and has overseen the introduction of new laws to come into force next year that will oblige immigrants to take German lessons in a bid to help their integration.
France has the biggest Muslim population in Europe with almost five million Muslims. A majority of the public there oppose Turkey's aspirations, although President Jacques Chirac backs the membership bid despite opposition from his and the other conservative party.
Chirac has warned that if Turkey enters talks to join the EU but fails to meet the criteria and negotiations are broken off, Turkey's resentment could spread to other Muslims in Europe.
"If negotiations are broken off... we will have to ensure that this does not lead to a separation between Turkey and Europe and we must find a sufficiently strong link between these two big cultural, political and economic groupings," Chirac said after talks with Schroeder this month.
The uproar which greeted a controversial law banning the wearing of Islamic headscarves in French state schools exposed the religious tensions near the surface in France, although after initial protests the overwhelming majority of Muslim pupils have complied.
The law was introduced as a result of a report published in 2003 which warned against the breakdown of French society into racial and faith-based groups, and is designed to reinforce the strict separation of religion and state, a basic value of modern-day France.
Spain has said it will support integrating Turkey into Europe, but is increasingly questioning how it itself is integrating Muslims.
The series of train bombs which killed 191 people in March in the worst ever terrorist attack on Spanish soil have been blamed on Islamic extremists and an increase in immigrants from north Africa, especially Morocco, is creating tensions.
STRASBOURG, France (Reuters) - Turkey was on course on Wednesday to get a date to start open-ended negotiations on European Union membership as final elements of a compromise package came together on the eve of a landmark EU summit. Despite last-minute rhetoric from Ankara and EU politicians most skeptical about its fitness to join the 25-nation bloc, diplomats said leaders would agree on Friday to open talks in October or November 2005 with the clear aim of membership.
"It is now time for the European Council to honor its commitment to Turkey and announce the opening of accession negotiations. A clear date should be indicated," EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso told the European Parliament.
"We accept that the accession process is open-ended and its outcome cannot be guaranteed beforehand," Barroso said.
His comments foreshadowed the expected wording of a summit statement, framed to assuage opponents of membership for the poor and mostly Muslim state of 70 million.
The directly elected assembly adopted by 407 votes to 262 a
non-binding resolution urging EU leaders to open talks with Turkey "without undue delay" and rejected decisively amendments offering a "special partnership" or refusing full membership.
Lawmakers urged Ankara to continue human rights reforms, negotiate with Kurdish separatists who renounced violence and recognize mass killings of Armenians between 1915 and 1923 as "genocide," something Turkey adamantly rejects.
After a 41-year wait to start talks, Turkey could not join the bloc until 2015 at the earliest. The negotiations will require a transformation of its economy and society far beyond the political and human rights reforms already enacted.
Diplomats said the summit statement would add that whatever the outcome, the EU would keep the strongest possible bond with Turkey, implying there could be another outcome if it failed to meet EU standards or chose to go another way.
Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel, one of the strongest skeptics on Turkish accession, signaled on Wednesday that such wording would enable him to agree to opening negotiations.
hmmm... niet bindend, ik geloof er niets van