The next European Council will examine the issue of Turkey and may put «much more pressure» on it because of its «unacceptable» behaviour in Nagorno-Karabakh, French Foreign Trade Minister Frank Rister said today.
In an interview with France Inter, Rister denounced Ankara's attitude towards calls for boycotts of French products in certain Muslim countries, against the backdrop of the controversy over the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
«Turkey is playing a reprehensible role in terms of instrumentalising the President's speech or France's positions in order to harm France and to harm the values that France stands for», the French minister said.
«We hope Turkey will change, we hope this behaviour will change, this expansionist behaviour in the eastern Mediterranean with these investigations that affect Cypriot and Greek sovereignty».
Rister also called on Turkey «to stop this behaviour, especially in North Africa with arms trafficking» and to «stop instrumentalising the migration issue in relation to Europe».
«Turkey is a great people, a great country with which we want to have diplomatic and economic relations, but we must have a dialogue of truth, because we cannot continue like this», he said.
«It is a reason for Europe and not just France and it is the reason why, once again, at the next European Council, this Turkish issue will be raised to see how we can put a little more, or a lot more, pressure on Turkey, because its behaviour, especially in the crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh, is unacceptable,» he added.
