ISTANBUL: Turkey’s economy minister condemned the European Union yesterday as the most hypocritical organisation in the world, in vitriolic remarks which underlined the EU candidate country’s growing alienation from Brussels.
Turkey’s bid to join the bloc has virtually ground to a halt in recent years due to opposition from core EU members and the failure to find a solution to the dispute over the divided island of Cyprus.
Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan said it made him laugh when he heard the EU had won the Nobel Peace Prize last week for promoting peace, democracy and human rights over six decades.
“The EU is the most two-faced union of all time. It is the most hypocritical organisation in the world. This EU has kept Turkey waiting at its door for 50 years,” state-run Anatolian news agency reported Caglayan as saying.
He attacked the EU for imposing visa requirements on Turkish business visitors and quotas on goods, describing this as a “a crime against humanity” and “torture” and condemned the award of the Nobel prize to a body responsible for unfair competition.
“If you award the EU with a prize for duplicity or hypocrisy, rather than one for peace, then we’d say fair enough, we accept that,” he said.
Masked gunmen kill Iraqi military adviser in Sana’a
SANA’A: Two masked men on a motorcycle shot dead an Iraqi military adviser to Yemen’s army yesterday, security and medical sources said, extending a series of killings bearing the hallmarks of Al Qaeda.
The United States is worried that Al Qaeda, entrenched in parts of Yemen will use a power vacuum to launch attacks abroad, and has stepped up drone strikes on suspected militants with the backing of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
Iraqi Brigadier General Khaled Al Hashemi, who works as a consultant at the Ministry of Defence, was gunned down near the foreign intelligence service building in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, a security source said.
“This operation is almost identical to the assassination of the security officer at the US Embassy and has the fingerprints of Al Qaeda (on it),” said the source, who asked not to be named.
Last week, Qassem Aqlan, a Yemeni man who worked in the security office of the US Embassy in Sanaa, was killed by gunmen in a drive-by shooting.
Hashemi was part of a team tasked with restructuring the Yemeni army after the popular uprising that ousted longtime strongman president Ali Abdullah Saleh in February.
He was one of several Iraqi military experts hired by the Sanaa government after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, a government source said.
Tuesday’s attack was the latest in a series targeting security officials and politicians in the impoverished and often chaotic Arabian Peninsula state, which is battling Islamist militants with U S assistance.
Agencies
