Austria today faced a bout of soul-searching about its treatment of foreigners and immigrants when the Turkish ambassador in Vienna accused the country of treating Turks “like a virus”.
The government – and most of the main political parties – reacted with outrage to the comments made by Kadri Ecved Tezcan, who was summoned to the foreign ministry for a dressing down.
Official protests were lodged with Ankara following the extraordinary exercise in straight talking. The Austrian chancellor, Werner Faymann, said the ambassador had insulted all Austrians.
The extreme right called for Austria’s diplomatic relations with Turkey to be severed.
Tezcan’s attack came in an interview with Die Presse newspaper yesterday.
He said the 250,000 people of Turkish origin in the country were forced to live in ghettos amid an ignorant and hostile host population whose political leaders pandered to xenophobia and competed for the anti-immigrant vote.
“Apart from on holiday, Austrians are not interested in other cultures,” Tezcan said.
“Austria was an empire with various ethnic groups. It should be used to living with foreigners. What’s going on here?
“Why have you given citizenship to 110,000 Turks? The Turks are happy, they want nothing from you. They just don’t want to be treated like a virus.”
Tezcan directed his anger specifically at leading politicians. The Christian democratic interior minister, Maria Fekter of the Austrian People’s party, was in the “wrong party”, he said, suggesting she was an extremist.
The hard-right Freedom party leader, Heinz-Christian Strache, had “no idea of how the world is developing”, Tezcan said.
Faymann’s Social Democrats were charged with running scared of the far right.
“I’ve never seen a social democratic party like in this country,” he said. “Usually, social democrats defend the rights of people wherever they are from. But do you know what the social democrats here have told me? ‘If we say anything about this, Strache gets more votes.’ It’s incredible.”
Faymann said he was “outraged”, adding that Tezcan had “insulted people in his host country, democratic institutions [and] international organisations in Vienna.
Green leaders, migration experts, and media pundits said Tezcan’s outburst had performed a valuable service.
But the political reaction was withering. “This behaviour is inappropriate and disrespectful,” Fritz Kaltenegger, the general secretary of the centre-right Austrian People’s party, said. “Ambassador Tezcan is obviously not aware of his role as a guest in our country.”
In the interview, Tezcan complained that, in his year as the representative of apowerful country of more than 70 million people, the Austrian foreign minister, Michael Spindelegger, had refused to see him.
“When I sought a meeting with the foreign minister, I was told he does not receive ambassadors,” he said. “Can you believe that? What kind of dialogue are we talking about here?”
He said he and his four predecessors had never been asked by the Austrian authorities to play any role in integrating Turks in the country.
But he reserved his most bitter remarks for Vienna, saying: “Almost 30% voted for an extreme rightwing party in this city that claims to be a cultural centre of Europe.
“If you don’t want foreigners here, chase them away. What is Austria’s problem? The Turks in Vienna help each other. They know they are not welcome.”
The eruption of tensions in Austria about immigration and Turkey’s position in Europe follow a series of incidents that have inflamed the issues in recent weeks.
In the Netherlands, the anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders achieved a pivotal position propping up a new rightwing government in return for a clampdown on Muslim immigration.
In Germany, a leading social democrat published a bestseller denouncing the impact of the large Turkish minority on life in the country, the Bavarian prime minister, Horst Seehofer, called for a halt to “alien” immigration from Turkey, and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel declared that two generations of multiculturalism in Germany had “utterly failed”.
Tezcan also turned his fire on Merkel, saying: “I was so surprised when she said that multiculturalism has failed, that Germany is a Christian society.
“What kind of mentality is that? I can’t believe that I need to listen to this in the year 2010 in a Europe that is supposed to be the centre of tolerance and human rights. Others learned these values from you and now you’re turning your backs on these values.”
Austria is viscerally opposed to Turkey joining the EU, with the far right prospering on anti-Muslim campaigning and raising ancient historical traumas such as the Ottoman Turkish sieges of Vienna in 1529 and 1683.
Faymann has promised a referendum on the issue should Ankara complete negotiations, which opened five years ago but are at a standstill because of Greek Cypriot vetoes and Franco-German hostility.
The European commission’s annual report on the negotiations this week was highly critical. Egemen Bagis, Turkey’s chief negotiator, accused the EU of Islamophobia and “myopia”.
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