BY FIKRET BILA
MILLIYET- The Foreign Ministry has delivered a note to the European Council and the European Union Commission concerning the decisions taken at the Dec. 17 EU summit stating that we won’t accept permanent restrictions. Thus, Ankara went on record with its own interpretation and rejection, as opposed to what was said at the summit. Ministry officials stated that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan also declared our rejections a few days ago. Opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal said that actually the note sent to the European Council and the EU should be considered as having been delivered to Erdogan. Baykal’s logic goes like this: ‘Seeing that you were going to reject the decision, why did you accept it on Dec. 17?’ Baykal thinks that Erdogan and the Turkish delegation accepted the decision in Brussels only so as to get a date for starting membership talks and trumpeted it in Ankara as a victory, but then recognized the real situation with the note.
Foreign Ministry officials said that the note was delivered in order to lay the groundwork for Turkey’s talks. They added that Ankara made clear both during and after the summit that it wouldn’t accept permanent restrictions. They also said that Turkey isn’t the only country which got a date for membership talks and later went on record with its own stance with a note, that in fact 20 countries used this same method before. When our talks start, Ankara will begin by stating that it won’t accept permanent restrictions on such issues as free movement and agriculture and that it said as much in a note to the EU Commission and the European Council. Meanwhile, the CHP is calling this a demonstration of the government’s contradictory stance over the decisions taken at the summit.