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  • Un-Holy Alliance

    UN-HOLY ALLIANCE - OBSERVER FROM ANKARA
    By Vincent Boland

    Financial Times (London, England)
    October 3, 2005 Monday
    London Edition 1

    There can be little doubt that the stakes involved in Turkey's quest
    for EU membership are high for Erdogan and his ruling Islam-tinged
    Justice and Development party.

    He raised expectations very high - perhaps excessively so - in the
    first two years of his administration, ahead of last December's EU
    summit at which Turkey was invited to become a member.

    In doing so, some critics say, he made Turkey, and perhaps his own
    political future, too dependent on the EU issue.

    Still, in going out on a limb for EU entry, Erdogan has won friends
    in unlikely places. When a minor court ordered the suspension of
    a recent conference on the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman
    soldiers in 1915, he was quick not only to object to the verdict
    (the conference went ahead a day late) but to insist that one needed
    to respect opinions with which one might disagree.

    The statement was welcomed by the academics attending the conference.

    As members of Istanbul's sizeable chattering class, they are not
    automatic Erdogan supporters. Perhaps they recalled that he, too,
    has suffered for freedom of speech: he was jailed in 1999 for reciting
    a banned Islamist poem when Istanbul mayor.
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