Madam, - I write in support of Turkey's entry to the EU. Of the several letters opposing the Turkish application, none has been able to advance convincing reasons that negotiations should not begin.
Turkey's human rights record and the state of its mental hospitals may not be very edifying but there are countries in the queue to join where conditions are no better. Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia have fought a bitter civil war, post-Communist Albania collapsed into anarchy, but that does not mean their applications will be rejected out of hand. The state of Romanian orphanages shocked the conscience of the world, yet it is recognised that its orphans will be better off when institutions are forced to conform to minimum EU standards.
Sean and Roisin Whelan come closer to the heart of the matter when they claim that Islam is "extremely undemocratic" (October 6th). This is wild overstatement. As Timothy Garton Ash pointed out in his book Free World (Penguin, 2004), half the Muslims in the world live in electoral democracies. If the Arab countries are left out of the reckoning, South Asian Muslim societies such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia have at least as good a democratic record as their Christian counterparts in Africa and South America. The Freedom House (a US group which promotes democratic freedom worldwide) counts Mali and Senegal, poverty-stricken Islamic countries, as free societies. Contrast that with "democratic" and Christian Zimbabwe. Ironically, it was once believed that Catholics where not "capable of liberty" because of their loyalty to Pope and priests. Even John F. Kennedy had to face down that accusation as recently as 1960.
Ash, in his book, reproduces the results of a survey of values conducted in 1999-2001, interviewing 120,000 people in 81 countries. Values were scored along two scales, from traditional to secular, and from survival values to self-expression. Turkey came in lower than Ireland on the self-expression scale, but ahead of EU members such as Poland, Hungary and Latvia. On the secular values scale, it came in slightly ahead of EU members Ireland and Portugal. Surely there is no reason in the area of values why Turkey's application should not succeed. - Yours, etc,
TOBY JOYCE Navan, Co Meath.