Turkey must relent

The issue of how best to approach a friend who has badly let you down is one more commonly dealt with at the back of this magazine, by our agony aunt on etiquette, Mary Killen. But this week it is one that needs to be addressed here. Over the past years this magazine has been a staunch defender of Turkey and its right to join the European Union, negotiations for which begin on 3 October. We have praised its economy, its founder-membership of Nato, and condemned the many Turkophobes within the EU — most notably Frits Bolkestein, the EU internal market commissioner, who last year fatuously claimed that the liberation of Vienna from the Ottoman Turks in 1683 ‘would have been in vain’ were Turkey allowed to join the EU.

Our point is that while Turkey is far from a perfect democracy, and still falls short of the standards we have come to expect of Western European nations, it is essentially a benign country travelling in the right direction. Alone among nations with Muslim majorities, it holds proper elections and, for the most part, maintains a legal system which Britons would regard as fair. It has 70 million industrious citizens who are keen to trade with us on equal terms. Moreover, as we have argued before, admitting Turkey to the EU would make it perfectly clear that, contrary to what some imams may say, the West has no desire to suppress Islam, only the malignant regimes which co-exist with it in the Middle East.

It would be a tragedy, therefore, if Turkish membership of the EU were to be jeopardised by Turkey’s ugly treatment of its most prominent novelist, Orhan Pamuk. Last week Mr Pamuk was charged under Article 301/1 of the Turkish penal code, which makes it an offence to insult the Republic of Turkey, punishable with between six months’ and three years’ imprisonment — increased by a third if the offence was committed abroad.