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Turkey: The impossible EU
dream
By K Gajendra Singh
In
early October, Turkey commuted to life imprisonment the
death sentence passed on Marxist Kurdish rebel leader
Abdullah Ocalan, now in a high security Turkish prison,
as another step to bring the country closer to the
Europe Union's human rights norms in its 40-year
westward journey to enter Europe.
But in the
European Commission's 1,000 page annual report, released
on October 9, Turkey was not even given a date to
commence negotiations for membership, while 10 other
aspiring countries will begin talks for entry in 2004.
These are Cyprus, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland,
Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and
Malta. In addition, the EC accepted the aspirations of
Romania and Bulgaria to join in 2007. These
recommendations are most likely to be endorsed at the
December EU summit in Copenhagen.
The snub to
Ankara comes at a sensitive juncture, as Turkey goes to
the polls on November 3, and the issue of the EU has
become a key and divisive electoral one which might
adversely affect pro-Europe and secular groups and
parties, and the matter has already created tension
between Ankara and Brussels.
Deputy Turkish
Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz, leader of the West-leaning
Motherland Party (ANAP- Anavatan Party ), one of the
three coalition partners in the government, said that
the heads of government meeting in Copenhagen might
ignore the commission's assessment and announce a
starting date for Turkey. He added that Turkey had
embarked on an ambitious program to meet the EU's
preconditions for membership, including more rights for
its Kurdish minority and the abolition of the death
penalty.
But Foreign Minister Sukru Sina Gurel
was blunt in saying that a failure to get a date would
have "a very negative effect on Turkish public opinion".
President Ahmet Sezer, speaking in Istanbul on October
11, said, "Reforms ratified by Turkey are the most
important reforms in Turkish history. Turkey has a
strong will to continue reforms and to implement them."
He also mentioned that he had sent a letter to the
president of the EC, Romano Prodi, with the hope that
the EU would persuade member countries to make the
political decision in Copenhagen to accommodate Turkey.
The country, he said, had demonstrated its will to
access the EU, and expected the EU to show a similar
will. In its report, the EC urged Turkey to do more in
the human rights field and increase civilian control
over the military.
In a remarkable show of
unanimity, despite opposition from coalition partner
National Action Party (MHP), the Turkish parliament,
after marathon sittings, in August passed a clutch of
constitutional amendments to fulfill many of the
conditions required for entry into the EU. Turkey has
been an associate member since 1963, and signed a
Customs Union agreement with EU in 1996. But it only
became a formal candidate in 1999.
The coalition
government is headed by a seriously ill Prime Minister
Bulent Ecevit of the Democratic Left Party (DSP), and
includes the MHP, led by Devlet Bahceli, and Yilmaz's
ANAP. The coalition started falling apart some months
ago with the departure of many leaders and deputies,
including the young and ambitious foreign minister,
Ismail Cem, finance minister Kemal Dervis, a former
International Monetary Fund employee sent to set right
Turkey's troubled economy.
The hemorrhage led to
a loss of majority in parliament and the advancement of
general elections by 18 months to November 3. Both the
DSP and the ANAP are lagging in the opinion polls and
struggling to get the 10 percent cut off vote necessary
to win any seats in parliament. Even the third coalition
member, the MHP, a nationalist fascist outfit, has been
struggling to stay afloat. But the EC's report will help
it in whipping up and riding on nationalistic jingoism,
as it did in early 1999 after a similar EC snub to
Turkey's European aspirations. Like Phoenix, an almost
moribund MHP rose from the dead to second position - it
did not have a single deputy in the earlier parliament.
Turkey's rich past and mixed
legacy
Also known as Anatolia and Asia Minor in
the past, Turkey is located at the juncture of Asia (and
connected to Central Asia via the Caucasus), Africa and
Europe, with the Straits of Bosphorus and Dardanelles
separating Asia and Europe.
Ruled in the past by
Achaemenid Persians; Greeks, Romans and Byzantines; and
then by Muslims and Ottoman Turks, the inhabitants of
Anatolia have tough identity problems. There is a
spiritual and psychological dichotomy between the
Europe-oriented elite in the west (many of them are of
European ethnic origin) at the head and a conservative
Oriental majority forming the body politic of Turkey.
In early 1996, as the electorate voted Refah
(Welfare), the largest Islamic party, into parliament,
Turkey entered into a Customs Union with Europe. With
its location, mixed ethnic composition, history, culture
and civilization, with modernizing and Westernizing
reforms during the last century of the Ottoman rule and
nearly 80 years after Kemal Ataturk's sweeping reforms,
Turkey's Islamic parties are perhaps the most moderate
in the Islamic world, certainly when compared to the
likes of the Taliban, Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front
and other variants in Pakistan.
Turkish tribes
broke into Byzantine Anatolia after Seljuk Sultan Alp
Arslan inflicted a massive defeat on Byzantine troops at
Manzikert, north of Lake Van in 1071 and captured
Emperor Diogenese, who was ransomed. With high cheek
bones, somewhat slanted eyes, like their present-day
ethnic cousins now ruling from Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan,
these simple Central Asian nomads finally overran the
whole of the Byzantine Empire. As they moved west they
named villages, rivers, forts, mountains; white (Ak),
black (Kara), green (Yesil ) and red (Kirmiz). The Black
Sea is called Kara Deniz, while the Mediterranean is
called Ak Deniz, and the shimmering sea linking the
Black Sea and the Aegean, Marmara, like marble.
Yilmaz still uses nomadic phrases such as "I
have taken out my sword to fight" (a political battle ),
while former prime minister Suleyman Demirel would
declare, when Turkey or his party faced a political
crisis, "We are passing through a narrow pass." (Like
Turcoman tribes with their herds of sheep or horses
surrounded by enemies). Some dynasties were even named
for their white or black sheep - such as the Akkoyunlu
and Karakoyunlu. Used to sleeping on horseback and
fighting for pastures which required quick thinking and
logistic movements with herds in the Central Asian
steppes, these nomads were physically very fit, with a
sharp strategic perception. After nearly 200 years,
Seljuk and other Turkish tribes terminated the Arab
dominance in the heartland of Islam in Iraq and Syria.
Turkish nomadic slaves, recruited for their loyalty and
fighting prowess as Praetorian guards to begin with,
took over power and upgraded the minor office of Sultan
into a powerful one - the protector of the by now
hapless Caliphs.
The republican Turkish
constitution and its electoral system endows political
party chairmen with excessive arbitrary powers. Thus,
many of them behave like powerful tribal chiefs,
branching off with their flocks and clans or persisting
with their rigid positions instead of democratic give
and take. The country's coalitions since 1983 have not
been based on ideology, rather they have been mostly
asymmetrical, including the current one. One would
expect Yilmaz to team up with Tansu Ciller, the
first-ever woman prime minister in Turkey and leader of
another rightwing secular formation, the True Path Party
(Dogru Yol Party-DYP), which did happen once. But their
sibling rivalry, more akin to a tribal vendetta, soon
saw their government collapse in mutual recrimination.
Under the shadows of Istanbul's minarets lie
monuments and ruins from its millennium and a half Roman
and Byzantine past. Less than six centuries ago, in
1453, Constantinople, the Byzantine capital founded in
the 4th century AD by Emperor Constantine, was
transformed into the new Ottoman Istanbul, by the
addition of minarets to the 6th century St Sophia
Church.
A crucible of over 40 civilizations,
Turkey has more Greek sites than Greece and more Roman
monuments than Italy. It is the cradle of early
Christianity, with churches of revelation - Chalcedon,
Nicomedea and Nicea are in Turkey. It was at Antioch
that followers of Jesus Christ were first called
Christians. St Peter gave his first sermon in a cave
near Antioch, and St Paul was born at Tarsus nearby.
Verily, it was the playground of early Christian
apostles, companions and preachers. If early Christians
were persecuted by the Romans here, it also became a
state religion under Constantine. Turkey was the site of
Byzantine power and glory for a millennia. With only
around 15 percent of the inhabitants of Turkic origin,
there lies buried deep in the Turkish psyche a more
persistent tradition of Byzantine intrigue, which seeps
through from time to time, especially during elections,
more so during presidential elections, much like
choosing popes, patriarchs and archbishops.
The role of the military
Here is an
example of the military in action - and not on the
battle ground. Following the 1971 military memorandum,
which had forced then premier Suleyman Demirel to
resign, a national government under the military's
shadow was in place to conduct the 1973 presidential
elections. The pugnacious and ambitious General Faruk
Gurler, a major force behind the memorandum, took over
as Chief of General Staff (CGS). Gurler then resigned
and presented himself as the military's candidate to
replace president Cevdet Sunay, also a former retired
CGS. Demirel and Ecevit, leaders of the two major
political formations with other politicians, in spite of
the military brass occupying the parliament galleries,
gave a stunning display of Byzantine intrigue, with the
parliament going through the motions of voting round
after endless round. But each time inconclusively. They
wore down the now unsure and somewhat divided military
in a virtuoso performance that would have made their
Byzantine ancestors proud. Finally, a compromise was
reached on a retired and innocuous naval admiral, Fahri
Koruturk, who was installed as the new president. A
rejected and dejected Gurler died a few years later,
forgotten and unsung.
Seven years later, at the
end of the bloody 1970s during which intra-religious,
intra-ethnic and left-right violence had left thousands
dead in Turkey, leaving its polity scarred and divided,
Koruturk's term ended in April 1980. But Demirel and
Ecevit could not agree on a candidate. For five months
over 100 rounds of polls were conducted in parliament
without a result. This was another display of clannish
obstinacy and total abdication of political
responsibility. General Kenan Evren then took over in
September 1980, much to everyone's relief, and banned
political parties and debarred political leaders. As a
measure of abundant caution, the 1983 constitution
prepared under the military regime provides for the
dissolution of parliament if it fails to elect a new
president after four rounds. The Turkish armed forces,
though, have always gone back to the barracks after
cleaning up the political mess.
It is as if the
armed forces, custodians of Ataturk's secular legacy,
based on a merit system since the days of the
Janissaries, modernized by the French and the Germans
during the later Ottoman era and since the 1950s a part
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, are trying to
guide Turkish society towards modernity and Western
contemporary values (a phrase often used by Kemal
Ataturk).
The November elections will see the
exit of the last of the older generation of leaders. The
past three decades have been dominated by old timers
nearing their eighties, such as president Turgut Ozal,
who industrialized Turkey in the 1980s. He died of a
heart attack in 1993. Necemettin Erbakan, the first and
the only Islamist prime minister (1996/7 ) in the
history of the Turkish republic, was made to resign by
the military and legally debarred from politics.
Demirel, seven times premier and a great survivor,
finally left power, most reluctantly, in 2000. A poll
after his retirement showed that few Turks wanted him
back in politics. Incidentally, all three men - Demirel,
Erbakan and Ozal - were engineering graduates from
Istanbul and contemporaries. Alpaslan Turkesh, founder
of the nationalistic fascist MHP, died a few years ago.
Ecevit, 77, is seriously ill and has announced that he
could give up the party leadership after the elections.
In the republic's 80-year history, six heads of
state have been military officers, with three civilian
politicians. For the 2000 presidential elections,
initially at the behest of premier Ecevit and MHP leader
Bahceli, ostensibly for political stability crucial for
the success of the government's US$4 billion
International Monetary Fund-backed economic reform
program, parliament went through the motions of amending
the constitution to allow a second seven-year term for
Demirel, on which he was very keen. Not being a
graduate, Ecevit was ineligible to be a candidate. After
failing to amend the constitution for Demirel, there was
little enthusiasm to attempt to amend it to make
non-graduates eligible.
The candidature of Ahmet
Sezer, the chairman of Turkey's Supreme Court, was then
propped up by Ecevit after the three coalition partners
could not agree on a parliamentarian, or even a retired
politician. Earlier, the parties had offered many
candidates as sacrificial pawns in a game of political
chess. Sezer was easily elected, but if the politicians
thought that they could manipulate the new president
they were soon proved wrong. He is his own man and he
has brought a refreshing change from the politics of
short-term interests to more emphasis on freedoms and
human rights.
Islam in
politics
Turkey's constitution describes the
country as a laic (secular) state, which, according to
many, is more Jacobin than genuinely secular. It is
based on the nationalist philosophy of Zia Gokalp, a
Kurd, who unfortunately used for laic/secular the words
la din, - anti-religion. After the founding of
the republic in 1923, the Christian minorities were
exchanged with Turks from Greece and the remaining
squeezed out later; the few left in the southeast are
leaving now. So the concept of secularism in Turkey has
somehow become anti-religion and negative, and tends to
become anti this or anti that and intolerant. The
Sunni-dominated police establishment has regularly
harassed the Shi'ite Alevis and the Kurds, who normally
vote for leftist secular parties.
Perhaps the
problem lies in the fatal belief of the establishment -
a curious amalgam of a military-led secular elite and a
Sunni-dominated interior ministry, organizations that
resolve problems by force as a compromise might be seen
as a weakness. The establishment considers Islamic
revivalism and Kurdish rebellion as the two major
threats to the security, stability and integrity of the
state.
But the left of center Social Democrat
Party (SHP), then led by Erdal Inonu (who was a deputy
premier in Demirel's coalition government of 1991-1995),
came to the conclusion in 1990, based on a study, that
neither Kurdish nationalism nor Islamic fundamentalism
posed a threat to the republican order. Many other
subsequent reports have confirmed the same conclusion,
underlining that most Kurds want respect for their
identity, and the use of the Kurdish language for
education and television and cultural freedoms.
Ironically, as many politicians point out, it
was mostly the military regimes that gave greater
freedoms to religious tendencies. Soon after Turkey
switched over to a multi-party system in 1945, president
Ismet Inonu, Kemal Ataturk's successor, made religious
education optional, to prevent voters from going over to
the newly-established conservative Democrat party.
Later, during General Evren's regime in the early 1980s,
religious education was made compulsory in schools.
Further, concessions were added during his presidency
under premier Turgut Ozal, who believed in
religious-cultural underpinning to counter communism and
Western values.
However, it was Islamist premier
Erbakan who established parties with religious
orientation from the early 1970s. He became deputy
premier in coalition governments led by Ecevit and
Demirel in the 1970s, and, like others put his cadres
and sympathizers in ministries controlled by him.
His first National Order Party was banned in
1972. Undeterred, he formed the National Salvation
Party, which was dismantled in 1980 after General Evren
took over power. In the late 1980s, he established the
Welfare Party (Refah), which won the largest number of
seats in the December, 1995 elections. Erbakan became
Turkey's first ever Islamist prime minister in 1996, but
was made to resign by the military in June 1997. Three
years later, the constitutional court banned the Welfare
Party on the grounds that it was engaged in
fundamentalist activity and was violating the secular
principles of the constitution. It barred Erbakan from
politics for five years. But immediately a new party,
Fazile - Virtue - under his chosen successor, Recai
Kutan, was established.
While in the opposition,
Erbakan had talked against NATO, opposed the Customs
Union with Europe, decried Operation Provide Comfort,
which allows the US and the UK to monitor the "no fly
zone" in north Iraq to protect Kurds and opposed
strategic defense cooperation with Israel. He used to
talk of creating an Islamic NATO and an Islamic common
market, an Islamic currency and banking based on Sharia
law. But during his tenure, although he made noises and
gestures, he did nothing as drastic. His major
initiative, perhaps, was D-8, an economic organization
of eight major developing Muslim countries - Turkey,
Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt
and Nigeria, which held its first summit just before
Erbakan was made to resign by the military. D-8 then
faded away.
When the Virtue Party was outlawed
in June, 2001, the Felicity Party (SP) under Kutan was
established. According to Kutan, his party wanted to
abandon Turkey's economic program" "All the IMF policies
would be annulled, and we would instead apply our own
program."
But Recip Erdogan and other younger
leaders, such as Abdullah Gul, set up a new party, the
Justice and Development Party (AKP). With a clan image,
Erdogan, who was a very successful and popular mayor of
Istanbul, has been stressing that they have nothing to
do now with Erbakan or his policies. He has not seen
Erbakan for many years. He even avoids any mention of
Islam. He has promised that he would do all he could to
facilitate Turkey's entry into the EU and he has also
expressed his backing for Turkey's relationship with the
IMF. He was jailed for several months in 1999 for
reciting a poem at a political rally that said,
"Minarets are our bayonets, domes are our helmets,
mosques are our barracks, believers are our soldiers."
Normally, two thirds of the electorate votes for
right of center parties, and the rest for leftist
parties. But like warring tribal chieftains, secular
rightwing parties will not fight the elections together,
nor easily form coalitions. Although Erdogan has been
recently debarred from contesting the elections (a
result of his jail term) his AKP is now the front runner
in most pre-election opinion polls. There is a distinct
possibility of the AKP and the MHP, Islamic and
nationalistic, getting a near majority of seats. But
Turks have a habit of turning logical conclusions on
their head. The latest distribution of seats among the
major parties in the 550-member parliament is: MHP -
125, DYP - 84, ANAP - 71, AKP - 59, DSP - 58, SP - 46,
YTP - 58, others - 13, independents - 22.
Kurdish question
The roots of the
Kurdish problem lie buried deep in the Turkish psyche.
The seeds were sown during the decline of the Ottoman
Empire and the birth of the Turkish Republic after World
War I. Turks complain that the Christian West used the
stick of religion and nationalism in Eastern Europe to
break up the empire during the 19th and early 20th
century (over 25 states have emerged out of the ashes of
the Ottoman empire, of which most of Yugoslavia was a
part).
In the late 19th century it was feared
that even the Kurds might desert, like the Egyptians.
But the last straw was the revolt by Muslim Arabs, for
the Ottomans always were Muslims first and Turks second.
Hence, Turks manifest a pervasive distrust of any
cultural or autonomous movement that might lead to the
fragmentation of the unitary republic. To begin with,
Ataturk himself had talked of Turks, Kurds, Lazes and
others. But a dramatic change came over him in 1923-24,
and he opted for a unitary state. In 1924, he abolished
the Caliphate and Kurds were just turned into
non-persons; their language, music, dress and culture,
even the use of Kurdish first names, was made illegal.
The reduction of Ocalan's death sentence to life
imprisonment and measures to let Kurds use their mother
tongue for education and culture will further ease
tensions in Kurdish areas. Ocalan has led the PKK
(Kurdish Workers Party) rebellion for a Kurdish state in
south and east Turkey since 1984, a struggle that has
cost over 30,000 lives, mostly Kurds, but the casualties
also include over 5,000 soldiers. Thousands of Kurdish
villages have been bombed, destroyed, abandoned or
relocated, and millions of Kurds have been moved or
migrated. Nearly a third of the Turkish army was tied up
in the southeast, costing nearly $6 billion to $8
billion a year. The unrest shattered the economy, and
gave rise to charges from the West of police and
military brutality and human rights violations.
Unfortunately, the republic, instead of
resolving problems politically, resorts to legal
measures, such as closing down political parties; not
only Islamic ones, but others, even one founded by
Ataturk after the 1980 intervention, and military
interventions or extra-constitutional means, such as
military threats to force out elected governments, as in
1971 and 1997.
Despite the country's serious
economic crisis, the Ecevit-led government has shown
enough confidence in addressing some of the underlying
causes of the rebellion, social and economic, and in
meeting Kurdish aspirations for cultural autonomy.
After 80 years, the republic should feel mature
and strong enough to resolve problems politically. While
the Ottoman Empire was built on loyalty to the house of
Osman and Islam, the republic was molded into a secular
rigid unitary state by Kemal Ataturk. While some
loosening of the state's heavy hand and Jacobin
attitudes has taken place since the 1950s, perhaps the
time has come for more flexibility in resolving problems
politically, through discussion and mutual
accommodation.
Many analysts feel that under the
pretext of guarding Ataturk's unitary secular state,
solutions to problems have been blocked by the vested
interests, which have also been cited as the main reason
for keeping Islamists out of power. The secular elite
does not wish to share the economic cake with the rising
conservative commercial and industrial classes from the
heartland of Anatolia and elsewhere, who support Islamic
parties. Many, including politicians, also talk of the
long shadow over democracy of the Turkish military, the
self-styled guardians of Ataturk's unitary and secular
state, making political solutions difficult.
Turkey and EU report
"It's awful
timing and possibly means that a new government won't be
very stable in Turkey after the elections," said a
specialist on EU enlargement in London commenting on
Turkey's rebuff. "The fundamental problem for the Turks
now is that they are getting no strong political message
from the EU about support for their application or any
indication of political willingness to make the
relationship closer. All they are getting is a cold
shoulder."
The decision to admit (Greek) Cyprus
without preconditions is a further blow for Turkey,
which has threatened to annex the Turkish northern part
of the island if Cyprus joins the EU before a political
settlement of the Cyprus problem is thrashed out. The EU
had been under Greek pressure to admit Cyprus with the
other nine candidates in 2004 or face a veto from Athens
over the whole enlargement process. The EU's decision,
though, will further polarize Turkey's already fractured
polity.
Turkey, a member of the Council of
Europe, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development and with a Customs Union with the EU, after
the collapse of the Soviet Union might be less important
strategically for NATO.
But after September 11
it has become vitally important to the US as it guards
against Iran, Iraq and Syria and beyond, actual and
potential cauldrons of Islamic fundamentalism. Because
of Turkey's strategic importance for the Caucasus and
Central Asia, the US has said that it would continue to
support Turkey's entry into the EU. In any event, the US
and the EU will keep Turkey engaged to further
strengthen its secular and modernizing forces and
parties. Disengagement would lead to an upsurge of
Islamic and nationalistic sentiments among Turks.
Turkish journalist Mehmet Ali Birand commented
after the EC's report, which had examined the level
which the candidate countries had reached in complying
with set criteria. He felt that it did not reflect
either a pro-Turkey or an anti-Turkey stance. It praised
aspects that merited praise, while criticizing norms not
reached.
One EC official told him, "We never had
something like that with any other candidate country.
The moment a country complies with the Copenhagen
criteria the accession talks begin. You pressed on
before the time came. You asked for the screening
process last year and you insisted on getting a date
this year. You have been impatient. You have tried to
burn your way through these stages. You think it would
be enough to take a few steps. Yet there is so much
ground to be covered. And then you come up and blame us.
You are creating unwarranted public tension and undue
public expectations."
The EU believed that the
reform laws passed in Turkey had certain shortcomings,
and that those that were passed were not being properly
implemented. Therefore, the commission decided to send
the ball into the court of the EU's leaders at the
December Copenhagen summit.
Another reason for
the EU stalling was the November elections. If they
result in an AKP and MHP coalition, Turkey will not be
given a date as the government will not implement the EU
laws. However, if a pro-EU coalition wins, it will
facilitate Turkey getting a date from the summit.
Secondly, if a solution is found to the Cyprus problem,
currently at a most critical stage, this will greatly
help Turkey's case. Finally, if the Irish say "no" to EU
expansion their October 19-21 referendum, the entire EU
enlargement program could grind to a halt.
Expectedly, US State Department spokesman
Richard Boucher said, "We think that better relations
between the European Union and Turkey are important to
us and that's something that we've consistently
advocated." Ankara's membership, he continued, "would
serve both Turkey's interests and the interests of the
European Union as well as the broader overall interests
that we have in this very important region." US lobbying
was not sufficient though, although some European
countries had bristled at US pressure.
In
private, many European diplomats make no bones about
there being little chance of Turkey joining the EU in
the near future. Greek opposition is many times more for
internal political gains. The main opposition comes from
Germany, which already has immense problems with its
over 3 million Turks (out of which 25 percent are
Kurds). Germany has also become a possible fertile
recruiting ground for Islamists, and funds from
nationalist Kurds and Islamists are routinely collected,
not always voluntarily.
The Turks were welcomed
into Germany as gastarbeiters (guest workers)
from the early 1960s, when the booming German economic
powerhouse needed more workers. Membership to the EU
would entitle nearly 70 million Turkish Muslims to
freely travel and work in Europe, with all its attendant
problems. The Bosphorus, as Europe's border with Asia,
is quite good enough where it is, say the diplomats.
With Turkey in the EU, Europe will then have Ali
Khameini of Iran, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and young Assad
of Syria as its neighbors, with their seeping borders.
If one drives west from Antalya along the
ancient Lycian southern coastline, now full of holiday
resorts and beaches, one reaches Cavuskoy, a small
village. There, one can walk up an incline for a few
bracing kilometers, and find children trying to dowse
methane fires that have issued from crevices since
ancient times. And one can gaze out over the shimmering
Mediterranean, from where Greek pirates once looked on
the burning fires as they glided by at night.
This is the origin of Chimera in Greek
mythology, the fire-breathing female monster that
resembled a lion in the forepart, a goat in the middle,
and a dragon behind. Chimera is now used generally to
symbolize a fantastic idea or a figment of the
imagination.
When polled, a good majority of
Turks have favored joining the EU, but their dream of
becoming a full member might just remain a Chimera.
K Gajendra Singh, Indian ambassador
(retired), served as ambassador to Turkey from August
1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served terms as
ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal.
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