[IsraelTimes] Germany’s FM says speech ’would not be appropriate given the current adversarial situation with Germany said Thursday it had rejected a request by Turkish President Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan the First
... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him...
to address ethnic Turks in Germany next week on the sidelines of a G20 summit.
Berlin-Ankara relations have badly deteriorated amid disputes over
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
’s mass arrests of alleged state enemies since a failed coup last year and a host of other rights issues.
German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said Berlin had received a request for Erdogan to be able to address members of the three-million-strong Turkish diaspora in the EU country.
"I explained weeks ago to my Turkish colleagues that we don’t think that would be a good idea," Gabriel said during a Russia visit, pointing at stretched police resources around the July 7-8 summit G20 in Hamburg.
"I also said quite frankly that such an appearance would not be appropriate given the current adversarial situation with Turkey," he added, stressing that Erdogan would however be "received with honors" at the summit.
Gabriel said he could "understand" his Social Democratic Party’s chancellor-candidate Martin Schulz, who had said "foreign politicians who abuse our values must not be allowed to give inflammatory speeches in Germany."
"I don’t want Mr Erdogan, who is jailing members of the opposition and journalists in Turkey, to hold large-scale events in Germany," Schulz told the Bild newspaper.
Erdogan last addressed Turkish-Germans in May 2015, in the city of Karlsruhe. The large Turkish diaspora is a legacy of Germany’s massive post-war "guest worker" program of the 1960s and 1970s.
But ties have been especially strained since the July failed coup in Turkey, and tensions have worsened over multiple issues including a referendum campaign to expand Erdogan’s powers.
Turkey imprisoned Deniz Yucel, a German-Turkish journalist with Die Welt daily, on terror charges earlier this year.
And this month Germany decided to withdraw its troops who support the fight against the Islamic State
...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling
Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not
reallyMoslems....
group in Syria from NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis....
partner Turkey’s Incirlik base and move them to Jordan after German politicians were refused the right to visit the base.
| Then there is the issue of Turkish spying on Gulenists and Kurds in Germany, and on German officials as well, and unsubtle threats to all three parties if Germany does not comply with Turkish |