A senior member of the European Parliament (EP) slammed Turkish EU Affairs Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu on Thursday for claiming he had been bought by the Hizmet movement inspired by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, saying the minister should either substantiate his accusation or apologize.
“Turk EU Minister @MevlutCavusoglu accuses me of being bought by Gülen. Doubtless he can substantiate that later,” Andrew Duff tweeted during discussions of a Turkey-EU Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) meeting, mentioning the accusation to Stefan Füle, the EU's commissioner in charge of enlargement affairs.
Çavuşoğlu, however, refused to offer an apology at the meeting, saying that his words were being misrepresented and that he had never made the reported comment about Duff.
In a surprising remark on April 2, Çavuşoğlu said that if the EU were to freeze accession negotiations with Turkey, this would demonstrate that the EU is controlled by the so-called "parallel structure,” a term frequently used by government officials about the Hizmet movement.
Responding to a question from a reporter at the Cihan news agency, which is affiliated with the Hizmet movement, Çavuşoğlu replied: “You play the song and dance to it. You have done this before. You have made some Liberal deputies [in the European Parliament] that you had a prior arrangement with say these things. You made Andrew Duff say it,” he said, addressing members of the so-called parallel structure.
Published on Today's Zaman, 10 April 2014, Thursday
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