BERLIN, Oct 3 (AFP) - German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder hailed Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as "a great reformer" here on Sunday just three days before the publication of an EU report on Turkey's suitability for membership.
Schroeder said that if the report from the European Commission -- the executive arm of the European Union -- recommended that Turkey be allowed to begin membership talks, then Germany would throw its weight behind Turkey.
"If the European Commission recommends opening accession talks, then Germany will clearly support that," Schroeder said in a speech before presenting Erdogan with the "Quadriga Bridges of Respect" award given by the privately funded Werkstatt Deutschland organisation for his handling of reforms in Turkey.
Schroeder said Erdogan was a "great reformer" whose drive for change could not be dismissed as a "concession to Europe".
"It is a consequence of his political convictions and also of his painful personal experiences with repression and persecution," the chancellor said of a man who was jailed for four months in the late 1990s under Turkey's strict secular rules for reciting a poem with an Islamic message.
However Schroeder warned that even if the report came out in favour of Turkey ending its wait for membership, it would only be "the start of a long process".
First the recommendation would have to be adopted at an EU summit on December 17 and then the talks could take years as the mainly Muslim nation of 70 million would have to meet a series of stringent criteria.
Erdogan himself admitted earlier in the day that even if Turkey was allowed to begin talks, it could be 2019 before it met all the criteria for EU membership.
Speaking after brief talks with Schroeder, Erdogan said the task lying ahead of Turkey was now to implement the reforms and that his country must not slip backwards in its modernisation process.
"The important thing now is that no change in mentality emerges. But we have the political will to overturn that," he said at a press conference.
The Commission's report is due to be published on Wednesday.
The report, already seen by AFP, says that Turkey has made significant reforms to prepare to one day join the EU, but that it still falls short in many key areas.
Erdogan said he believed Turkey's inclusion in the EU would lead to a more peaceful world and that the country could act as a gateway to Asia for the rest of Europe.
He dismissed suggestions that Turkey continued to torture detainees, saying there was "neither systematic nor unsystematic torture" in the country.