Turkije: Reactie Reding Roma-kwestie laat zien dat mensenrechten ook binnen de EU serieus worden genomen (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The Turkish ambassador to the EU, Selim Kuneralp, has said that Viviane Reding i's attack on French Roma expulsions will help non-EU countries to swallow Brussels' criticism of human rights in future.
Speaking to EUobserver on Tuesday (14 September), a few hours after the EU commissioner dubbed as a "disgrace" the French policy of mass Roma deportations, the senior diplomat said: "I am very happy to see the commission showing the same kind of sensitivity to human rights violations at home as it does in candidate countries or third countries."
"We are being kept under very close watch and in Turkey, sometimes, this causes frustration, at the popular level, so this statement will be welcome because it shows the commission takes equally seriously perceived violations in influential member states as it does in third countries."
Mr Kuneralp estimated that there are 4 million people of Turkish origin currently living in the EU, some 3 million of them in Germany and 300,000 in France.
He noted that no Turkish-origin EU residents have ever been threatened with en masse deportation on the French Roma model and that the Turkish EU community has by and large integrated well and enjoyed economic prosperity. He said "there is an analogy" between the situation of the Roma and other ethnic minority groups however, and voiced "serious concern" over the rise of hard right politics in Europe in the past two years.
Asked by EUobserver if he had ever encountered racism or xenophobia at a personal level in his dealings with the Christian Democratic establishment in Berlin, Brussels or Paris, the ambassador said: "No. Not in the elite. I'm being honest and truthful. I think the elites are too well educated and too sophisticated to go down that road of simple and elementary racism."
But he cautioned that leaders of democratic countries can sometimes be tempted to accommodate popular trends in ways which "are not always helpful." "The responsibility of leaders is to lead. If they basically follow trends of popular opinion they stop being leaders and become followers," he said.
Mr Kuneralp pointed to Germany's handling of the Thilo Sarrazin affair - its expulsion from the Bundesbank board of a controversial anti-Muslim politician - as an example of "sensible government."
On French President Nicolas Sarkozy i, he said: "I don't want to comment on the leader of a friendly country. But what I read goes very much in the direction of the French government trying to take into consideration the views of this small minority, and a sort of drift to the right."
In a historical aside, the ambassador noted how times have changed since the first big wave of Turkish immigration in the modern period in the two decades after World War II.
Turkish visitors to the EU today face high visa costs, intrusive questions about their personal financial situation and bureaucratic delays. Prospects of EU-Turkey visa liberalisation are low due to EU fears of a major exodus to the north. And Turkish citizens already working in Europe face legal obstacles when trying to move from one member state to another.
"In the 1960s and 1970s they were invited as guests. Look at photos from the 1960s, where you can see Turkish workers arriving in train stations in Germany - they were greeted with flowers because they came to contribute to Germany's reconstruction," he said.
"Migrants come because there is work. Today there is not so much work [in the EU]," he added.