BY SAMI KOHEN
MILLIYET- Hurriyet’s headline yesterday read: ‘The Paris Criteria.’ Below the headline was a detailed account of how the French police attacked and beat a group of high school students two weeks ago. The French press almost succeeded in covering up the beatings, but thanks to Choc magazine, the scandal was made public. Strangely enough, neither France nor the European Union has made any explanation of the incident. However, when the Turkish police beat several demonstrators in Istanbul back on March 6, the EU wasted no time criticizing Turkey. The difference between how the EU reacted to the incident in Istanbul and how it reacted to Paris shows clearly the double standard applied to Turkey by the EU. It’s our right to criticize such a scandal, but we should also work hard to prevent such things from happening in our own country.
Turkey’s Secretary-General for EU Relations Murat Sungar yesterday made interesting remarks at a conference on Turkish-EU relations organized by Dogus University. Sungar said that Turkey’s membership talks aren’t always centered on the Armenian and Cyprus issues, that there are other things discussed in the negotiation process, such as educational, financial, and environmental reforms.
If we don’t want to stray from our path to EU membership, we must focus on how we can perform all these in addition to political reforms.