A chara, – I can see no reason why your editorial of September 10th on Turkey’s domestic politics should have been so fixated on the 1980 coup.
It fails to reflect the deep and lasting changes that have taken place in Turkey, transforming the country into one of the largest democracies in the world and an important member of the G20.
The editorial contains too many worn-out cliches, unbefitting this paper’s well-appreciated intellectual rigour and evasion of shoddy, opinionated handling of important issues.
Certainly, if Turkey is a negotiating country for full membership of the EU, it is because it has already fulfilled the Copenhagen criteria.
Surely the EU would not have opened the negotiations for accession if the Kurds were oppressed in the way you make it sound. Indeed, the expanding process of democratisation, as witnessed by the referendum last Sunday, and the vibrancy of that whole process, do not come out neither in sense nor in style.
With recurrent references to an entirely different era, your readers are led to believe that the Turks somehow continue to live suspended in time.
Turkey left that era behind at about the same time when European nations, in the west and in the east of the continent, grasped the chance to fully embrace democracy.
Some 77 per cent of Turkish voters participated in last Sunday’s referendum. Indeed, Turks have been traditionally enjoying probably the highest voter turnouts, while European nations, including Ireland, send deputies to the European Parliament with participation rates that seldom exceed a paltry 40 per cent.
Democracy is not solely about participation rates, I agree, but an editorial of this sort should not have allowed itself to be captured by so powerful an undercurrent of anachronism.
– Is mise,
ALTAY CENGIZER, Ambassador of Turkey, Clyde Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.
Irish Times