Turkey cheers EU green light, puts brave face on conditions

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan insisted Thursday that Turkey aimed at nothing short of full membership to the European Union, dismissing concerns that stringent conditions imposed by an EU report may serve to keep his country hanging at Europe's door.

"Turkey has overcome an important threshold on its road to the EU," Erdogan told legislators in parliament.

In a major boost to this country's 40-year dream of joining the EU, a European Commission report recommended Wednesday that the bloc start accession talks with Ankara, saying it had fulfilled the required political criteria.

EU leaders, many under strong pressure from public opinion hostile to the vast and relatively poor Muslim nation, will take the final decision on December 17 on the basis of the recommendation.

The commission, however, said the start of talks was not a guarantee that Turkey would one day join the EU and warned that it would seek the suspension of negotiations if Turkey backtracks on democracy.

Erdogan admitted that Turkey faced an uphill battle if talks started, but stressed that the process would be irreversible.

"A country which has started negotiations is a country which has embarked on the road to full membership," Erdogan said. "Otherwise, what meaning would there be to holding negotiations with a country that will never be admitted as a full member?"

Turkish newspapers, adorned for the occasion with Turkish and EU flags, were jubilant, playing down the strings attached to the recommendation.

"A historical green light for Turkey," the conservative Zaman trumpeted on its front page, while the mass-circulation Milliyet declared: "Today is a more beautiful day."

An editorial in Hurriyet, the country's biggest-selling daily, said Turkey had taken a huge step toward fulfilling the will of its founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who pointed firmly to the West after establishing the modern secular republic on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923.

"This is the day when the great Ataturk should have been among us. He should have witnessed the most concrete result so far of the revolution he carried out 80 years ago," it said.

Most columnists dismissed the conditions set for Turkey as an attempt to placate the country's many opponents in Europe, and some even said that putting Turkey under tougher monitoring would ensure that governments in Ankara do not stray from the path of reform.

Erdogan said the tight procedures the Commission proposed for negotiations with Turkey were "discrimination" compared with the rules applied to other candidates in the past.

"But if we have confidence in ourselves, we should not be afraid," he said in an interview with the CNN-Turk channel.

Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said Wednesday that the report set conditions different from those applied to other candidates on "technical matters" concerning how the talks would proceed.

He gave as an example a recommendation to screen Turkish laws following the start of the talks -- a procedure he said had already been completed in Turkey.

Erdogan promised that his government would do its best to ensure that the conditions are softened in the December 17 decision.

Despite the overall sense of satisfaction, some observers wondered whether the conditions outlined in the report would keep Turkey from ever joining the

The recommendation of the commission translates into an "endless negotiation process", the left-leaning Cumhuriyet wrote.

"'Let's start the talks, but we cannot tell you whether there is light at the end of the tunnel': This is the summary of what was said yesterday," the daily wrote. "In its essence, this is not all that different from the (unfavorable) responses given to Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s."