CHANCELLOR ANGELA Merkel and Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have traded barbs ahead of the German leader’s state visit today to Turkey.
Ahead of her first visit to Ankara in four years, Dr Merkel called on the three million Turkish nationals living in Germany to make a greater effort to integrate into their adoptive home.
Meanwhile, Mr Erdogan denied in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine that the 1915 massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire was genocide.
Despite close business and cultural ties, Dr Merkel’s visit is unlikely to take the edge off bilateral relations burdened by Turkey’s ambition to achieve full EU membership.
Dr Merkel insists that Ankara should make do with a “privileged partnership” while Mr Erdogan says full membership is the goal “from which Turkey will not veer”.
“We are already in negotiations for full membership,” said Mr Erdogan, adding “making proposals that differ from this is like shifting the goal post during a penalty kick – absurd”.
Dr Merkel picked up on a notorious 2008 speech by Mr Erdogan, encouraging Turks living in Germany to integrate while warning them that assimilation was a “crime against humanity”.
“We don’t want assimilation but that people who have lived here for generations integrate and participate in our society,” said Dr Merkel. “That means, of course, that the German language is learned and German laws are respected.”
She dismissed Mr Erdogan’s call for Turkish-language academies to be set up in Germany.
With a standoff on most bilateral issues, the two leaders will hope to make progress on an issue of mutual interest, namely Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
But the two camps seem far away from meaningful common ground on how best to proceed.
Dr Merkel said yesterday that if Iran “does not show transparency” on the nuclear issue then “we must think about sanctions”.
But Turkey, currently a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, is of a different view.
“Multiple sanctions have been placed on Iran but with what result so far?” asked Mr Erdogan in Der Spiegel. “We need diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy. Everything else threatens global peace and yields nothing else.”
In an apparent nod to Israel, he added: “At least Iran doesn’t have any nuclear weapons at the moment . . . We don’t want any nuclear weapons at all in this region.”