Obama was key to resolving row with Turkey over NATO chief succession
US President Barack Obama was instrumental in ending Turkish obstruction to the appointment of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as the new NATO secretary general, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday. Erdogan told Turkish television that Obama had offered Ankara a number of guaranties, which he did not detail. Western diplomats in Strasbourg agreed that the American president had on his own secured the last-gasp deal to name a successor to outgoing NATO head Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.
The Turks had strongly objected to Rasmussen because of his handling of the 2005 and 2006 row over caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed that appeared in Danish media and angered large sectors of the Muslim world.
Note EU-Digest: More important than the cartoons, which relate to the freedom of the Press, is that Turkey was angered by the fact that Denmark continues to allow the operation of the outlawed Roj-TV, serving as a mouthpiece for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the PKK, which is outlawed in Turkey, the EU and the US. Last year the German government issued a ban on Roj-TV and all affiliates including its production company in Germany, VIKO Fernseh Produktion GmbH. The Mesopotamia Broadcast A/S, a Danish-based private broadcasting company, was also banned from operating in Germany. German Government officials and the Turkish Government the station has been encouraging viewers to become guerrillas, a claim that the Turkish government has been actively pursuing for several years.
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