Trilateral summit canceled over Turkish PM's remarks

Source: Danas

BELGRADE -- The trilateral summit of Serbia, Turkey and Bosnia-Herzegovina, planned to take place in Belgrade, has been canceled, the Belgrade-based daily Danas writes.

(Tanjug, file)

The newspaper said it received a confirmation of this from the Serbian president's cabinet.
President Tomislav Nikolić, prompted by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's statement that "Kosovo is Turkey and Turkey Kosovo," in late October announced that he would freeze his participation in the trilateral initiative.

Earlier this week, Turkish website Today's Zaman reported that Serbia had "indefinitely postponed the trilateral summit with Turkey... as Turkey failed to improve relations with Serbs by expressing regret over the wrong interpretation of the remarks of Prime Minister Erdogan about Kosovo".

The website said that "attempts by Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to smooth things over did not meet the expectations of Serbia."

Davutoglu told the Turkish television TRT 1 that "some nationalist circles in Serbia took the statement out of context and misinterpreted it."

"This response did not alleviate Serbia's anxiety over Erdogan's statement," a source told Today's Zaman.

At the session of the UN General Assembly in September Davutoglu, Serbian Foreign Minister Ivan Mrkić, and Bosnian Foreign Minister Zlatko Lagumdzija agreed that a new trilateral meeting would be held in December in Belgrade. Regardless of the cancellation of the summit, diplomatic sources told the Turkish media that "the trilateral mechanism is in place and functioning."

Faruk Logoglu, an MP from the ranks of Turkey's main opposition party, the Republican People's Party, reacted to the news by saying that "Prime Minister Erdogan and Foreign Minister Davutoglu either do not know where the state borders of Turkey are, or are not satisfied with them."