Epress.am News from Armenia
Turkish President Abdullah Gül and French President Nicolas Sarkozy had an angry exchange over Iran at this weekend’s NATO summit in Lisbon, according to reports in the Turkish media.
Sarkozy had been insisting on naming Iran as the main source of a potential nuclear attack, something NATO decided not to do in the end and a prospect of much concern to Turkey.
“Forget including any country. The missile shield project should not target any country,” Gül told Sarkozy, according to the reports. The Turkish president told his French counterpart that the proposed missile shield over Europe was not designed to protect NATO allies from a single country but from any ballistic threat, daily Milliyet reported Sunday.
Turkey’s argument that NATO should not name any country as a threat was supported by most of the members of the alliance, including the United States and Britain. France, which had been persistent on the matter during previous negotiations, abandoned its insistence on including Iran in the NATO document as a specific threat, Milliyet wrote.
Stressing Iran’s importance for Turkey as a neighboring country, Gül noted the migration wave from Iraq to Turkey created in the wake of the first Iraqi war.
“An economic problem also emerged. We don’t want to face the same problem again,” he said. “Thus we are trying all the diplomatic ways to solve this problem.”
“We don’t want to experience a second Iraq in our region,” Gül told Turkish journalists in Lisbon after the summit, reports Hürriyet Daily News.