EU ministers seek to ease tensions with Turkey

Bratislava: The European Union must mend ties with Turkey, Slovakia's Foreign Minister Miroslav Lajcak said on Friday, as the bloc's 28 ministers met to discuss a fraught relationship that has soured further following a failed coup in Ankara. Turkey has accused the EU of being slow and half-hearted in its condemnation of the failed coup, while hurrying to criticise President Tayyip Erdogan for a purge of officials from police and army to journalists and academics that followed. Lajcak, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, is hosting his 27 fellow ministers in Bratislava, where they will also meet Turkish EU minister Omer Celik on Saturday. The bloc is seeking to retain Turkish co-operation in slowing a flow of refugees from war zones including Syria into EU states. "It's not normal that after the failed coup when we expressed the strong solidarity with the elected leaders of Turkey, instead of getting closer to each other, there is mutual frustration," Lajcak told reporters. "Turkey is an important partner, we need to clarify what it is that what we want from Turkey and with Turkey and then I expect that after tomorrow's meeting we will help to improve, normalise the atmosphere between the EU and Turkey." Turkey blamed the US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen for the attempted coup, in which more than 200 people were killed, and went on to detain or dismiss tens of thousands of people for allegedly sympathising with him. Some in the EU were sceptical and believed Ankara was using the failed coup as a pretext to go after Erdogan critics. The worsening atmosphere in EU-Turkey ties triggered worry that Ankara could walk away from a migration deal, which sharply cut the number of migrants and refugees reaching Europe, giving a much-needed breathing space to EU leaders after the mass influx of 2015. But there are signals the EU's tone on Turkey is softening after the summer break. One indication is that a senior lawmaker with the European Parliament -- a body often very critical of Turkey's track-record on human rights and rule of law -- said this week that the EU might have "underestimated" the gravity of the failed coup and urged dialogue with Ankara. In Brussels, a senior EU official said many have grown to believe the situation in Turkey would be way worse had the coup succeeded. But for all the conciliatory signals coming from the EU side, many ministers arriving in Bratislava still stressed the need to combine cooperation with Turkey with pressuring Ankara to raise democratic standards. "Part of this tensions are coming from misunderstandings and we have to slow down these," Italy's Paolo Gentiloni said. "Other issues are very serious and so the support to Turkish authorities cannot be separated from our commitment to the human rights and the rule of law. We have to balance the two."