Turkish parliament's EU Harmonization Committee chief hosts Icelandic Foreign Affairs Committee head

By Ertugrul Subasi

ANKARA (AA) — The head of Turkish parliament's EU Harmonization Committee met on Thursday with the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of Iceland's parliament.

Increasing contact and cooperation between lawmakers and parliaments will help develop bilateral ties, Burhan Kayaturk said while hosting Dilja Mist Einarsdottir and her delegation in the Turkish capital Ankara.

Kayaturk said the trade volume between Türkiye and Iceland had reached $78 million, adding that they aimed to expand and diversify economic and commercial relations.

Emphasizing that Türkiye views EU membership as a strategic goal, he asserted that the bloc is being influenced by some of its members.

Kayaturk said linking the Cyprus issue directly to Türkiye-EU relations is unfortunate. He called the accession of the Greek Cypriot administration to the EU a "strategic mistake," noting that it had rejected the UN's 2004 Annan plan, which was accepted and supported by Turkish Cypriots and Türkiye to resolve the dispute on the Eastern Mediterranean island.

He also said the EU considers the Fetullah Terrorist Organization (FETO), a group that mounted a failed coup in Türkiye in 2016, a civil society organization.

Kayaturk underlined that the main reason for the EU freezing Türkiye's EU accession negotiations in recent years is the bloc's biased and misguided political stance on FETO and Cyprus issues.