Turkey must not use extortions to promote its own interests

Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic Miroslav Vlcek expressed here Wednesday the belief that the position of the EU Czech Presidency will not be in any case neutral concerning issues as the recent statement by Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the Nabucco pipeline.

“We have not given to anyone the chance to use extortions to promote his own interests,” Vlcek said after a meeting with Cyprus House President Marios Garoyian who is paying an official visit to Prague, at the invitation of his Czech counterpart.

“If Turkey has the impression that the issue of Nabucco pipeline will be promoted at the expense of Czech Republic’s support to Cyprus, this must not happen in any case,” the Czech Speaker underlined, responding to a question.

Vlcek said that he did not think that one can conclude that his country will allow Turkey to use in a blackmailing way the projection of positions on these issues.

On his part Garoyian expressed his concerns about the way the Turkish side forms its policies, “an inexorable, imperialistic, intransigent policy which does not help to the settlement of the Cyprus question on the basis of principles and of the EU values and which is far from the resolutions and the principles of the international law.”

“This is why we asked the Czech Republic, as a prominent EU country, to contribute to the direction of exerting pressure on Turkey, so that it will abandon this ineffective and unfruitful policy concerning the Cyprus question,” he added.

Turkish Prime Minister said recently that Ankara will re-examine its participation to the project for the planned Nabucco pipeline and the channeling of natural gas, if the Union does not exert pressure on the Republic of Cyprus to give its consent for the opening of the chapter on energy, in the framework of Turkey’s EU accession negotiations.