AFP/Berlin

 

 

Erdogan: Yes to integration ... but no to assimilation. No one can tear us from our culture
The German government reacted crossly yesterday after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan used a visit to insist that the children of Turkish immigrants should learn Turkish before German.

“Our children have to learn German, but first they must learn Turkish,” Erdogan had told members of Germany’s 2.5mn-strong Turkish minority in a speech in the western city of Duesseldorf late on Sunday.

“I want everybody to learn German and get the best education ... I want Turks to be present at all levels in Germany – in the administration, in politics, in civil society,” Erdogan told the crowd.

“Yes to integration ... but no to assimilation ... no one can tear us from our culture,” said Erdogan, who met Chancellor Angela Merkel later to open the CeBIT high-tech fair in Hanover, northern Germany.

“Children who grow up in Germany have to learn German first of all,” insisted German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle in a statement yesterday. “If they don’t speak German they will fall behind at school and will have fewer chances than the others later on. The German language is the key to integration.”

Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert said the speech “contained a lot that was positive from the German government’s point of view” but he also took issue with Erdogan’s comments about language.

“Teachers at many of primary schools would say quite clearly how difficult it is for children who come into their first class with incomplete or broken German,” Seibert told a regular government briefing in Berlin.

“These children are at a disadvantage at school that they only overcome with great difficulty, or not at all.

“We are therefore convinced that learning German and Turkish should at least be given equal emphasis, so that you can be sure that the children ... speak German as well as their classmates who are not of Turkish origin,” he said.

The secretary-general of the Bavarian sister party to Merkel’s Christian Democrats went further, calling for the Turkish ambassador in Germany to be summoned for a dressing down.

“Erdogan’s speech has set back our integration efforts in Germany by years,” the Die Welt daily quoted Alexander Dobrindt as saying on its website.

Erdogan caused a similar storm in nearby Cologne in 2008 when he said that assimilation, which he defined as a person being “forced” to abandon their culture, was a “crime against humanity”.

Germany has been wracked by a debate on immigration since last August, when a member of the central bank sparked outrage by saying the country was being made “more stupid” by poorly educated and unproductive Muslim migrants.

The banker, Thilo Sarrazin, resigned but his book – Germany Does Itself In – flew off the shelves to top best-seller lists, and polls showed considerable sympathy for some of his views.