BRUSSELS - European Union (EU) announced on Thursday that 12 candidate countries except Turkey approved the recent form of the EU list of terrorist organizations published in EU Official Gazette.
EU decided to form such a list of terrorist organizations after Sept. 11 terrorist incidents in the U.S. in 2001 and it included terrorist organizations PKK and DHKP/C to the list last year.
EU freezes the properties of the terrorist organizations and persons mentioned in the list. Some terrorist organizations try to find ways of saving themselves from these sanctions by changing their names. Spain and Turkey suffer from that.
EU renews its list of terrorist organizations once in every six months. This list is also submitted to the approval of 13 countries which are candidates of EU. Candidate states accept to apply the same sanctions to the terrorist organizations and its members as the EU by approving the list. Turkey has not approved the list for the first time to date.
Sources said that Turkey didn't approve the list as it insisted inclusion of KADEK, the new name of PKK terrorist organization to the EU list, but EU didn't do anything about it. Turkey showed its reaction to EU by not approving the new list.
EU sources in Brussels said that they were surprised as Ankara didn't approve the list and noted that the new list was accepted by all candidate states.
EU officials don't issue any statement yet about the reason of not including KADEK to the list.
(Öª) 18.09.2003