EU painting terror group as NGO is very wrong: Turkey

By Sibel Ugurlu

ANKARA (AA) - Turkey blasted the EU on Wednesday for painting the Fetullah Terrorist Organization (FETO) -- the group behind a defeated July 2016 coup -- as an “innocent NGO.”

"It's is extremely wrong to mention FETO as an innocent non-governmental organization," Omer Celik, Turkey’s EU minister, told a news conference in the capital Ankara.

His remarks come a day after the European Commission released a report on the state of Turkey’s EU accession bid, after a one-and-a-half-year hiatus since the last report.

While calling the July 2016 defeated coup attempt, which martyred 250 people and injured some 2,200, "a traumatic period in Turkey," the report’s description of FETO is unchanged from the November 2016 report, which called the terrorist group the "Gulen movement."

Celik also accused the EU of being biased and not objective towards Turkey.

"Leaving Turkey's member country perspective aside and only [focusing on] cooperation on other issues, going back to neighborhood policy, is not acceptable," Celik said.

Celik charged that the EU report doesn't present fair, objective, criticisms with a positive future perspective.

"It is a report which has no vision and content, which is far from understanding the intensity, dimensions and perspective of relations, and it also lags behind developments," he said.