Turkey ready to calm Armenia row with Berlin: Minister

BERLIN: Turkey's foreign minister signalled Wednesday Ankara was ready to calm a row over Germany's parliament labelling the Ottoman-era massacre of Armenians a genocide but warned against treating Turkey as a "second-class country".
The comments came as a new media freedom row, centred on German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle, emerged as another irritant to the long-troubled ties between the EU's top economy and its Nato ally Turkey.
The bitter dispute over the Armenia resolution has seen Turkey barring German lawmakers from visiting their nation's troops at the airbase of Incirlik, from where Nato forces are fighting jihadists in Syria and Iraq.
Germany last week stressed that the June parliamentary vote was a political statement and not legally binding, and voiced hope its parliamentarians would be able to visit Incirlik in October.
Asked about the request, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told Die Welt daily that "if Germany continues to conduct itself as it does now, then we will consider it".
"But if Germany tries to treat Turkey badly, then this won't be the case," he added, according to the newspaper's German translation, stressing that "Turkey is not a second-class country".
German Chancellor Angela Merkel (pix) met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a G20 summit in China at the weekend and afterwards said she hoped for progress "in the coming days" on the requested airbase visit.
Germany hopes to invest €58 million (RM264 million) in mobile barracks and other facilities for its more than 200 troops in Incirlik, Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday.
It uses the base in southern Turkey for surveillance and refuelling flights as part of multinational efforts to fight the Islamic State group.
Free media 'non-negotiable'
Other sources of discord remain, including German criticism of the Erdogan government's treatment of critical journalists, its Kurdish minority and of many of the alleged plotters detained in sweeping arrests after a failed coup in July.
In the latest issue to trouble relations, Deutsche Welle on Tuesday condemned the confiscation of an interview it had conducted with a Turkish minister as a "blatant violation" of press freedom.
According to the broadcaster, Youth and Sports Minister Akif Cagatay Kilic, straight after the interview, demanded it not be broadcast while ministry employees confiscated the recording.
Merkel's top spokesman Steffen Seibert insisted Wednesday that "press freedom, for us, is a high, I would even say non-negotiable" right.
A foreign ministry spokesman labelled the incident "not nice" and said Germany campaigns for press freedom "everywhere, for everyone".
The German ambassador in Turkey had contacted the chief of Kilic's office over the Deutsche Welle case, said the spokesman, Martin Schaefer.
The two had "an engaged and ... good and constructive talk, at the end of which both sides voiced hope that what happened will not lead to further disruptions in German-Turkish relations", Schaefer said.
Germany is home to a three-million-strong ethnic Turkish population, the legacy of a massive "guest worker" programme in the 1960s and 1970s. — AFP