[BRIEF NOTE] Turkey in the EU?

[rfmcdonald]

From Reuters, an article suggesting that the prospect of Turkey becoming a member-state of the European Union any time soon can be comfortably rejected.

A Turkish university facing accusations of "treason" has postponed a conference that offered a platform to academics questioning Ankara's official policy denying any World War One genocide of Armenians.

The conference, due to start on Wednesday at Istanbul's Bosphorus University, was organised as Muslim Turkey faces mounting international pressure to accept that mass killings of Christian Armenians starting in 1915 was genocide.

Turkey's pro-European government has broken with past administrations and said it is willing to discuss historical differences with Armenians, but official policy still vehemently rejects claims that 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered.

It accepts that hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks but says even more Turks died in a partisan conflict that erupted as the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

Justice Minister Cemil Cicek said in parliament on Tuesday the conference by Turkish historians who say genocide occurred was a "stab in the back of the Turkish people".

"We must end this treason, the spreading of propaganda against Turkey by the people who belong to it," he said.

Bosphorus University said it had decided to put off the conference because of the prevailing climate.

"We are anxious that, as a state university, scientific freedom will be compromised due to prejudices about a conference that has not yet occurred," it said.

"We have decided it would be more appropriate to postpone the conference because of the results that could occur if the conference were held under these circumstances."

State-sponsored genocide denial is profoundly ugly. State-sponsored genocide denial, as a policy of a country trying to get into the European Union, is also suicidal.

Opponents of Turkish membership in the European Union already have enough legitimate and illegitimate reasons to want to keep Turkey out. By so strenuously denying the Armenian genocide (and, perhaps, committing acts of negationism which would be treated as criminal offenses in most of Europe), the Turkish justice minister may just have scored a spectacular own goal. Way to go.