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POLAND Armenian Genocide: Erdogan lobbied Merkel

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Erdogan lobbying merkelVoice of America (VOA) has just reported that according to information disclosed, Erdoğan called on German Chancellor Angela Merkel to publicly announce that the “Armenian resolution was not the government’s position” as one condition that members Germans are allowed to visit the 250 soldiers stationed at Incirlik.

In an interview with ZDF, she said: “A way must be found for members to visit the troops. We must continue to work on that, the solution is not yet there. “ In response to a question whether it would consider the withdrawal of troops from İncirlik if no agreement was reached, Merkel said she was focused on solving the issue by exchanging.

Cem Özdemir, the leader of the Greens in Germany, who is of Turkish origin, told the ARD television, “As Members who send soldiers to places we need to know where they are, how they are and be able to talk to the soldiers. If this is impossible in Turkey then the soldiers must return to Germany. “

The Secretary General of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria (CSU), Andreas Scheuer, also said that MPs should be allowed to visit the troops. “Because of his behavior, the Turkish President Erdoğan risk the withdrawal of the German army,” has he said Monday the daily Tagesspiegel.

Wednesday, July 13, 2016,
Stéphane © armenews.com

Merkel rejects Erdogan: government will not make statement against resolution of Bundestag

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Merkel-rejectThe Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have said to Angela Merkel that he will allow the German MPs to visit the Incirlik military base, if the German government announces that it does not agree with the Armenian resolution adopted by the German Parliament . The Turkish periodical Diken reports that banning the visit of the German MPs to the Incirlik military base have  created a new tension in Turkish- German relations.

The Turkish foreign minister tried to ease the tension of the situation , announcing that the German military delegation can visit the Incirlik base, but the visit of the civilians is not appropriate . That statement provoked the outrage of the German MPs and the German Ministry of Defense . He said that they will go to Incirlik and meet with the German troops.

It is noted that the tension began within the framework of the NATO summit meeting between Merkel and Erdogan , when Erdogan announced that the German MPs will visit the military base in Incirlik , if the German Government states that it disagrees with the resolution that recognizes the Armenian Genocide earlier adopted by the Bundestag. The German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected Erdogan’s condition, saying that the German government will not make a statement against the resolution of the Bundestag.

 

 

Merkel calls Brexit ‘a watershed for Europe’

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Merkel ukGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel has called the UK’s decision to leave the European Union a watershed for Europe and European unity. It’s now up to her and EU leaders to ensure other countries don’t follow suit.

“There’s no way around it: Today is a watershed for Europe and the European unity process,” Merkel said before urging other EU leaders not to be hasty in their responses to Britain’s referendum vote.

As Europe’s most powerful leader and the head of Europe’s largest economy, Merkel must now lead negotiations on new terms for the UK’s relations with the EU, including the access of British companies to the biggest single market in the world.

Speaking to journalists in Berlin, the German chancellor said the EU was strong enough to find the “right answers,” adding that the aim of future talks should be to ensure bilateral relations with Britain are “close and based on cooperation.”

While other EU chiefs have said the UK must begin the exit process as soon as possible, Merkel made no such appeal. She said she would keep the interests of German citizens and German businesses in mind during any talks.

Germany: Bundestag urges Angela Merkel to stand up to Turkey

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German Chancellor Angela Merkel commemorating the 100th anniversary of the World War I battle of Verdun | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

German Chancellor Angela Merkel commemorating the 100th anniversary of the World War I battle of Verdun | Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Ankara is readying an ‘action plan’ in response to Germany’s Armenian genocide resolution.

By JANOSCH DELCKER

(politico.eu) BERLIN — As Angela Merkel tries to salvage the EU’s refugee deal with Turkey, German MPs want her to stand up to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and other Turkish officials for their angry and aggressive response to a vote on the Armenian genocide.

The chancellor was accused of being mealy-mouthed in her response to verbal attacks by Erdoğan and others on German MPs of Turkish origin for their role in the Bundestag’s (lower house) approval of a resolution declaring the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians under Ottoman rule an act of genocide.

“Their blood is impure and we know whose mouthpiece they are,” the Turkish president said in Istanbul on Sunday, singling out 11 German MPs of Turkish descent. They were “the long arm of the separatist terrorists placed in Germany,” he said.

Furious at last week’s vote, Ankara withdrew its ambassador to Berlin, leaving Merkel struggling to ring-fence a deal for Turkey to help Europe with its refugee crisis in return for visa liberalization for Turks. Relations were already strained after a German comedian read out an obscene poem about Erdoğan on TV. Under pressure, Germany agreed to prosecute him.

Turkey opposes the term “genocide” being attached to the deportation and murder of members of the Christian Armenian authority by Ottoman Empire authorities during World War I, when Turkey was a German ally. While acknowledging there were deaths and deportations, Turkey rejects as exaggerated estimates that 800,000-1.5 million people died between 1915-16.

Last weekend, Ankara’s Mayor İbrahim Melih Gökçek tweeted a collage of photos of 11 German-Turkish members of the Bundestag who backed the genocide resolution, accusing them of “stabbing us in the back.”

Merkel’s response, during a news conference Tuesday, was to call the Turkish response “incomprehensible” and defend the MPs in question as “freely elected parliamentarians.”

This fell far short of how the opposition Greens expected the chancellor to defend their German-Turkish co-chair Cem Özdemir, whose home has been put under increased police protection since the vote.

“The chancellor has to take up a definite position [against Erdogan,]” his Green colleague Claudia Roth, who is a vice-president of the Bundestag, told DPA news agency. “We can’t let him get away with that.”

Already in the lead-up to last Thursday’s vote, Özdemir said he had received insults calling him “a traitor, Armenian pig, son of a whore, Armenian terrorist, or even a Nazi.”

“People – which includes, unfortunately, prominent people – are consciously stirring up hatred,” the Green MP, who had been a driving force behind the Armenian resolution, told journalists on Monday.

Conservative MP Michael Grosse-Brömer, a parliamentary leader of Merkel’s conservatives, urged members of the Bundestag to “stand by one another” and reject any attempt at undue influence, saying it was “completely unacceptable to threaten MPs of Turkish descent based on how they vote.”

Thomas Oppermann, leader of the Social Democrat bloc — Merkel’s partners in the ruling ‘grand coalition’ —  said he hoped the chancellor would make it very clear “that she finds this witch-hunt against German parliamentarians intolerable.” The opposition Left party requested a special debate on the issue, which will take place on Thursday.

So far, however, the German protests have been to no avail. Ibrahim Kalin, a spokesman for Erdoğan, said on Wednesday that Turkey was “preparing an action plan” against Germany over the Armenian vote, with the foreign ministry in charge of drawing up the specific measures to take.

Turks who voted for Recognition of Armenian Genocide, in bundestag

Turks who voted for Recognition of Armenian Genocide, in bundestag

On Tuesday, the mayor of the Pazar district, which is home to members of Cem Özdemir’s family, told Turkish journalists he planned to withdraw Özdemir’s honorary citizenship of the town. Instead, the title will be offered to the only German MP to vote against the Armenian genocide resolution, the conservative backbencher Bettina Kudla.

Also on Tuesday, a scheduled German media visit to a Turkish air base in Incirlik, where German fighter jets are stationed to praticipate in the international campaign against ISIL, was cancelled at the last-minute by Turkish authorities.

The Turkish government had hoped that its lobbying and influence among the 2.9 million German citizens of Turkish ancestry — who make up about 4 percent of the entire population — would prevent the repeatedly postponed Armenian vote.

“I believe many of the attacks are meant to stir up the Turkish community in Germany, and to increasingly set them against the rest of the German population,” Hans-Georg Fleck from the Istanbul bureau of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, a German Liberal think-tank, told Deutschlandfunk radio on Wednesday, adding that a “considerable share of Turks in Germany, at least among those who can still vote in Turkey, is particularly receptive to Mr. Erdoğan’s arguments and propaganda.”

As of Wednesday afternoon, the Turkish ambassador to Germany was still out of the country, according to an embassy spokesman. The government in Berlin was sticking to a softer diplomatic approach: The German foreign ministry said Tuesday it had “invited” a representative of the embassy to discuss recent developments.

Authors:

Janosch Delcker 

Merkel says Turkish slurs against German MPs incomprehensible

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f5756cc4a62986_5756cc4a629b3.thumbGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel said accusations levied by Turkey against German lawmakers of Turkish origin after its parliament passed a resolution declaring the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces a genocide were incomprehensible, Reuters reports.

“The lawmakers in Germany’s lower house of parliament are freely elected without exception and the accusations and statements which have been made by the Turkish side are incomprehensible,” Merkel told a joint news conference with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev in Berlin.

On Sunday, Erdogan lashed out at the German parliament for passing the resolution and suggested that Germany was being hypocritical given its own history.

Erdogan has also been widely reported in German media as saying that German lawmakers of Turkish origin who voted for the resolution have “tainted” blood and that their blood must be tested in a lab.

Merkel will not attend vote on Armenian Genocide resolution

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merkel not to joinGerman Chancellor Angela Merkel agrees with her parliamentary group that the Armenian massacres should be called a genocide, her spokeswoman said on Thursday.

However, Christiane Wirtz said the Chancellor would not attend the vote at the Bundestag on Thursday due to other official engagements on her schedule, Local.de reported.

The resolution titled “Remembrance and commemoration of the genocide of Armenians and other Christian minorities in 1915 and 1916” has been drafted by Merkel’s Christian Democrats and junior coalition partner Social Democrats, along with the opposition Greens.

German politicians say Merkel left EU exposed to Turkish blackmail

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Cigndc-VEAAS029By Michelle Martin

BERLIN, May 15 (Reuters) – German politicians accused Chancellor Angela Merkel at the weekend of making Europe overly dependent on Turkey in the migrant crisis, leaving the bloc vulnerable to blackmail by President Tayyip Erdogan.

Turkey, refusing to bow to European Union demands to rein in its broad anti-terror laws, said on Friday talks on a deal to provide visa-free travel in return for stopping illegal migrants reaching the EU had reached an impasse and the bloc must find a “new formula” to salvage the agreement.

Merkel, whose popularity has suffered due to her liberal migrant policy that saw Germany take in more than one million migrants last year, had spearheaded EU efforts to secure the deal, signed in March.

While the numbers of migrants have dropped sharply this year, Merkel continues to attract criticism from her conservative allies in Bavaria as well as the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD).

“I’m not against talks with Turkey but I think it’s dangerous to become so dependent on Ankara,” said Horst Seehofer, leader of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU).

Seehofer told Welt am Sonntag (WamS) that the deal with Turkey had helped boost support for AfD, which is currently polling at up to 15 percent.

Sahra Wagenknecht of the opposition far-left Linke party told the same newspaper Merkel had essentially negotiated the deal without involving her European partners.

“The chancellor is therefore responsible for Europe having become vulnerable to being blackmailed by the authoritarian Turkish regime and for Erdogan feeling noticeably strengthened to crush human rights underfoot,” she said.

Cem Oezdemir, co-leader of the Greens party and the son of Turkish immigrants, also told WamS the deal had put Europe at risk of being blackmailed and said Merkel was largely to blame.

While the EU is desperate for the deal to succeed, it also insists that Turkey meet 72 criteria, including anti-terror laws which it says Turkey uses to stifle dissent. Ankara says it needs sweeping legislation to fight Kurdish insurgents and Islamic State.

Merkel is due to attend the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul on May 23 and there are plans for bilateral talks with other leaders in attendance, her spokesman said on Friday.

Members of the Social Democrats (SPD), Merkel’s junior coalition partner, also expressed concern.

Carsten Schneider told WamS Merkel had made Erdogan the key to her refugee policy and if he stopped cooperating, “the extent of Germany’s isolation in Europe will become clear again”, while Thorsten Schaefer-Guembel said Merkel should not “kowtow” to Erdogan.

But SPD Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told Tagesspiegel newspaper Turkey was still the key country for migration to Europe, adding: “We need to cooperate to some extent if we want to avoid the circumstances we had last year.”

Merkel has drawn heavy criticism for allowing German prosecutors to pursue a case against a German comedian at the Turkish leader’s behest. The comic had recited a sexually crude poem about Erdogan. (Reporting by Michelle Martin; Editing by Clelia Oziel)

Germany: Turkish visa free & Billion euro extortion hit Merkel political earthquake

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DW Press review: ‘Nightmare for the CDU’ in German state elections,

Merkel defeatHere in Germany, reporters called it a “black election Sunday,” with one commentator smelling a “whiff of Weimar” in the AfD’s successes. But what did the international press have to say about Sunday’s state elections?

Spanish daily El Pais described Sunday’s election results as a “political earthquake” in Germany, “which has an influence on numerous parties.” El Pais singled out the Social Democrats, in particular, calling it an “enormous humiliation” for Germany’s second party to slide towards just 10 percent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt in the east and Baden-Württemberg in the southwest.

Many international outlets focused, however, on the losses incurred by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. Le Figaro’s Berlin correspondent Nicolas Barotte described the results as a “nightmare” for the CDU and party leader Merkel. “One sole topic dominated the campaign,” Barotte wrote, “the refugee crisis.” Discussing the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) and its huge hauls in all three states, he concluded: “This populist party’s anti-immigration, anti-establishment campaign worked.”

Similarly, British paper The Times said that Merkel “was given a bloody nose by voters” flocking to the right-wing, euroskeptic AfD “in a backlash against her generous refugee policy during its first test at the ballot box.”

The Daily Mail found yet clearer terms with which to describe the outcome, calling it the electorate’s “crushing verdict on open-door migration.” Political correspondent Jack Doyle wrote that the AfD had “surged in popularity following Mrs Merkel’s decision to roll out the red carpet for more than a million migrants.”

The Guardian’s correspondent, Philip Oltermann, noted that Frauke Petry’s “right-wing upstarts appeared to have benefited from an increased voter turnout across the country,” explaining how the AfD won more support from first-time voters than it did from disillusioned Christian Democrats. In France, Le Monde spotted the same trend, writing that “yesterday’s non-voters have become today’s AfD voters.”

‘Scrambling politics’ in Germany

The Wall Street Journal’s story noted how the AfD’s 24-percent haul in Saxony-Anhalt comfortably exceeded pollsters’ predictions, with Anton Troianovski positing that “the migration crisis is scrambling politics in Europe’s largest economy.”

“The results laid bare the extent to which the migration crisis has polarized German society,” Troianovski wrote. “Left-of-center proponents of a welcoming refugee policy also recorded wins Sunday, even as Ms. Merkel’s conservatives suffered,” pointing to the successes of Winfried Kretschmann, the Greens’ charismatic state premier in Baden-Württemberg, and Social Democrat Malu Dreyer in Rhineland-Palatinate.

Swiss daily Blick told its German-speaking readers that “Germany is torn,” calling the ballots a twin vote of no-confidence – both in terms of refugee policy and grand coalition government more generally. It noted how the historic fear of the CDU and especially its Bavarian CSU sister party had come to pass – that a party had established itself to the right of Germany’s conservatives.

“For the first time, in the shape of the AfD, a party to the right of the Union has won a lasting foothold, and now sits in eight out of 16 state parliaments. In Saxony-Anhalt the party achieved a real first: it claimed more than 20 percent of the vote and became the second largest power,” Blick’s Iris Mayer wrote.

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung similarly saw a “warning shot towards Berlin” and next year’s federal elections in Sunday’s results, calling them a “clear signal of [voter] dissatisfaction.” The paper says the established parties have two political responses open to them: either to recognize “that the majority of the voters for the fast-climbers [the AfD] are not merely a bunch of grubby racists, extremists and simpletons, who are best ignored” or, alternatively, to launch into “an indignant outcry in the media and politics about the threat from the ‘right-wing-populist’ AfD.” The second scenario, Peter Rasonyi writes, seems the most likely reaction, “but it’s not too late to reconsider.”

Unintended Consequences: Merkel’s Reliance on Turkey Makes Life Worse for Refugees

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Merkel turkish boederBy , and

Chancellor Angela Merkel asked Turkey to help reduce the number of refugees coming to Europe. But instead of closing its Aegean coast to migrant smugglers, Ankara shut its border with Syria, making it difficult for those threatened by the war to leave.

Suddenly, the connection breaks off. Nadim Shami* presses the telephone against his ear and cries: “Maryam! Can you hear me?” He calls the number of the smugglers, but nobody answers. Nadim Shami is sitting in a teahouse in the town of Antakya, on the Turkish-Syrian border, and taps his fingers on the table. He’s waiting for a sign that his wife is still alive. Four hours earlier, Maryam Shami had set off from a refugee camp in northwestern Syria together with her two sons Yasin and Mohammed and her daughter Samira.* A migrant smuggler brought the family to the Turkish border, where Maryam Shami and her children hid in the bushes until darkness fell. The last words Nadim Shami heard from his wife on the telephone were: “We’re heading out.”

Nadim Shami, 28, used to work as a mechanic in the northwestern Syrian city of Idlib, but last summer, he fled the violence to Turkey hoping to find work and an apartment in Antakya before bringing his wife and children over to join him. He hadn’t thought that Turkey would close off its border with Syria.

That too, though, has become a side effect of Angela Merkel’s refugee policies. For months, the chancellor has faced rising pressure to reduce the number of people coming to Germany on the search for security and a bit of prosperity. Recently, in fact, speculation has been mounting in Berlin that Merkel may soon be forced out of office. Large numbers of conservative politicians — both with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union — have demanded that the chancellor close the German border to refugees. Merkel, though, has thus far refused, hoping instead for help from her European partners and, in particular, from Turkey.

The chancellor has one main goal she would like to achieve by the beginning of March: The number of refugees coming from Turkey to Greece should drop significantly. If that happens, Merkel is prepared to take in set quotas of refugees from Turkey — even if not all EU member states agree to help.

Turkey has begun making efforts to combat the refugee crisis, but differently than Merkel had hoped. Rather that increasing patrols on the coast, where many refugees jump on boats heading for the nearby Greek islands, Ankara has closed the border to Syria.

Source: spiegel.de

 

Merkel extortion money to Turkey for refugees, Poll: 40% of Germans want Merkel to resign

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Merkel-ErdoganForty percent of Germans want Chancellor Angela Merkel to resign over her refugee policy, a poll showed on Friday, Jan 29, in a sign of rising dissatisfaction with her welcoming stance towards people fleeing conflict and economic hardship in the Middle East and Africa, Reuters reports.

Merkel, who enjoyed record high popularity ratings early last year, has grown increasingly isolated in recent months as members of her conservative bloc have pressed her to take a tougher line on asylum seekers and European allies have dragged their feet on the issue.

Responding to popular pressure, Merkel’s conservatives and their left-leaning Social Democrat (SPD) coalition partners agreed on Thursday to tighten asylum rules, reaching a compromise on how to stem the influx of migrants.

The Insa poll for Focus magazine surveyed 2,047 Germans between Jan 22 to Jan 25. It showed 45.2 percent believed Merkel’s refugee policy was not a reason for her to resign. It was the first time the pollster had asked voters whether Merkel should quit.

Another poll released on Friday, by the Elector Research Group, showed support for Merkel’s conservative bloc steady at 37 percent. As recently as September, they were on 42 percent. Support for the SPD was also unchanged, at 24 percent.

The poll put the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), which supports a hard line on immigration, on 11 percent.

The three ruling parties – Merkel’s Christian Democrats, their Bavarian allies, and the SPD – are eager to show voters that the government is in control of the refugee crisis before three state votes in March and a general election next year.

A dispute over tighter immigration rules has nonetheless been straining the ruling coalition.

Merkel has also faced criticism from other European Union countries for her stance on migration, including from Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi who she meets later on Friday.