The European Union and Turkey sought yesterday to tone down a dispute about the EU rebuff to Ankara's membership hopes. The Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Yevgeny Primakov, tackling broader issues at a meeting of the 54-state OSCE, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, criticised NATO expansion as divisive.
The EU Foreign Affairs Commissioner, Mr Hans van den Broek, met the Turkish Foreign Minister, Mr Ismail Cem, on the fringes of the OSCE conference after the EU had put Turkey at the back of its queue of applicants.
Mr van den Broek said he favoured a "period of reflection and calm" in EU-Turkish relations.
Mr Cem said the EU had offered Turkey a "third-class compartment" but, he told a news conference: "The EU is a goal. If Turkey does not become a member, it's not the end of the world."
Ankara also appeared to soften a threat by the Prime Minister, Mr Mesut Yilmaz, to withdraw its application if the EU did not include it in a list of candidates for membership. The dispute over Turkey upstaged talks by the OSCE on mapping out a new security charter for Europe.
Mark Brennock adds: Ireland is enthusiastically backing a proposal for a new Charter for European Security for the next century at the OSCE summit. The summit is today expected to clear the way for negotiation of such a charter, which is intended to be the definitive post-Cold War model of European security.
Speaking to the summit yesterday, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Andrews, called for "the creation of a common security space, free of dividing lines, in which all states are equal partners". In a reference to Ireland's wish not to join any military alliance, he said a new security charter "must respect the rights of states freely to choose their own security arrangements".
Russia has repeatedly expressed its desire to see the OSCE take on a more developed role on the international scene, to the detriment of NATO, whose eastward expansion Moscow opposes.
Ireland is a strong supporter of this aim, preferring the prospect of the OSCE developing as a non-partisan European security forum, rather than allowing power to remain with the NATO military alliance, of which it is not a member and which Irish neutrality precludes it from joining.
Mr Andrews, who in the past fortnight has attended two sessions of the Northern Ireland talks and the EU summit in Luxembourg as well as undertaking a visit to Algeria, told the Copenhagen gathering that with its "inclusive" membership - involving the states from both sides of the former Iron Curtain - the OSCE "is best placed to promote co-operation on security".