ANKARA - Justice and Development Party (AK Party) leader and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday that Turkey should and will take part in the reconstruction of Iraq.
Referring to issues on the agenda of Turkey during the parliamentary group meeting of his party, Erdogan said that Turkey would take part in rebuilding of Iraq with its industrialists, exporters and contractors as Iraq was a neighbour of Turkey and it had geostrategic and geocultural importance for Turkey.
Noting that Turkish economy started to recover, Erdogan said that ''in this season, I think that there will be a boom in the number of tourists coming to Turkey. There is an increase of 50,000 in the number of tourists coming to Antalya this year when compared to last year.''
Erdogan claimed in his speech that there were certain politicians in Turkey who could not fulfil their political responsibilities and who still could not understand the concept of unitary state structure. ''No body can show AK Party government as if it is against the unitary state. There is no understanding which is against the unitary structure of the state in the studies on reconstruction of the public sector... What we opt for is that Turkey has to ease its central administration and focus on decentralization. We want to strengthen the local administrations. This is important regarding the EU process of Turkey.''
(ÖS-AÖ) 29.04.2003