Isolating Turkey would be 'masochistic': Italian FM

ROME

Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni has warned against isolating Turkey, saying it would be a “masochistic” act.

In an interview publish Friday in Italian daily La Stampa, Gentiloni said that “Turkey is under attack” by terror organizations, and expressed his country’s support for Ankara’s EU ambitions.

“Supporting it [Turkey] in the process of approaching with EU is not a formal gesture,” he argued. “Instead, it emphasizes the awareness that isolating it would be masochistic”.

The interview comes three days after a terror attack in Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport which killed 44 people and left more than 200 injured.

Gentiloni said Turkey is trying to get closer to the EU at a time when Great Britain is taking itself out of the Union.

“Ten years of closed doors from Brussels did not help,” he argued.

Turkey started negotiations to join the European Union in October 2005, and still continues, while Croatia, which started them at the same time, joined the EU in 2013.

Gentiloni praised the Turkish-EU agreement to solve the refugee crisis as well as this week’s steps toward normalized relations between Ankara and Moscow.

Turkey is an important actor in solving the Syrian crisis, he said, which he called “the mother of all crises”. “We defend human rights,” he said, adding that despite different opinions on Syrian Kurds, being prejudiced against Turkey “is a mistake that Italy never made”.