The European Union wholeheartedly welcomes the Turkish government’s efforts to end the age of military tutelage and consolidate civilian rule over the country, the union’s top envoy to Turkey has said, Hurriyet Daily News reports.
“There’s no doubt that we support this normalization [in civil-military relations],” Jean-Maurice Ripert told journalists yesterday. “The mainstreaming of the role of the army under civilian control is one of the bases of civilian democracy,” he added, citing the EU’s Progress Report released in 2011, which hailed the progress Turkey has made in harmonizing its civil-military ties with EU norms.
“Generally speaking, any country should face its past,” Ripert said, adding that this notion made possible the very foundation of the EU in the late 1950s.
Ripert however, said the issue of arrested deputies was essentially incomprehensible to any EU citizen. “For any EU citizen, it’s strange that there are arrested deputies. We understand that this is a very complicated, difficult and strange issue.”
