ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul accused the European Union yesterday of playing “petty games” with his country and of lacking a broad vision. Turkey began EU membership talks in 2005 but the bloc has frozen talks in eight policy areas over Ankara’s Cyprus policy. Nicolas Sarkozy’s election as French president has also strained ties because he is opposed to Turkey ever joining the EU. “The EU has now become a group playing petty games... The EU can keep its door shut to Turkey if it wishes,” Gul said in televised comments during campaigning for this month’s parliamentary elections. Gul said the EU needed to show more vision and recognize the strategic benefits of taking in Turkey, a large, mainly Muslim country with a fast-growing economy and a youthful population. “A developed Turkey will become very attractive. Then the EU will give up its petty games,” he said.

Winterthur (AP) – Two Turks were arrested on Saturday on suspicion of breaking Swiss anti-racism laws for allegedly denying that the killing of Armenians in the early 20th century was genocide, police said. The two were arrested at a conference in the Zurich suburb of Winterthur, where posters were hung up and leaflets distributed rejecting that the killing was genocide. One of the Turks organized the event and the other was shouting slogans before a crowd. Switzerland’s anti-racism legislation, which previously applied to Holocaust denial, was used earlier this year to prosecute a Turkish politician for denying at a gathering in 2005 that the Turks committed genocide in the World War I era killings.

The main opposition Bosnian-Serb party, founded in the early 1990s by genocide suspect Radovan Karadzic, on Saturday re-elected Mladen Bosic as its leader, local radio reported. Bosic’s re-election for a four-year term was backed by 313 out of 334 delegates gathered at an extraordinary session of the Serb Democratic Party (SDS). Following his re-election, the 46-year-old electrical engineer pledged “significant activities in order that the SDS returns in a remarkable way to the political scene in both Bosnia-Herzegovina and Republika Srpska.” (AFP)

Three Turkish soldiers were killed on Saturday by a land mine set by Kurdish rebels in Turkey’s eastern Tunceli province, security forces said. The incident occurred during a clash between troops and members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) after the separatists barricaded a road between the provinces of Erzincan and Tunceli on Friday. The deaths came days after Turkey’s top army general repeated his call on the government to allow a cross-border operation into nearby northern Iraq to crush PKK camps there. (Reuters)