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Press TV has conducted an interview with Ian Williams, with the Foreign Policy In Focus from New York City, to shed more light on the issue of the Turkish government’s crackdown on protesters and the subsequent decision of the European authorities to postpone the country’s EU accession talks. 

Following is a rough transcription of the interview.

- Mr. Williams, first of all how much did Turkey’s crackdown on the demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara have an impact on its EU accession bid?

- Well, the accession talks are going ahead. The immediate one, scheduled for Wednesday is canceled; and the rest of the European countries, sort of, hammered out this compromise with the Germans and the Austrians and the Dutch who wanted to send a message, but part of the problem is of course, that the Germans and the Austrians don't want Turkey in any way, so this looks like that they are using an excuse but there are genuine grounds that the rest of Europe recognizes that there should be some type of protest to the Erdogan government about the severity of the crackdown on demonstrators.

- Will this policy be long-term to postpone Turkey’s EU accession bid?

- From the compromise that was hammered out, it looks like they will send a signal by postponing talks this Wednesday but they are going to continue with the overall program and the rest of Europe are looking and they are saying to themselves, Hey! we let Greece in, we know the Greek government put down the riots quite brutally, why are we are picking on Turkey? And that is just strange.

You know, Erdogan is being castigated for being Islamist but one commentator pointed out that in this context he was being more Turkish than Islamist as a long tradition of what you might call a lack of gentleness on the part of the Turkish security forces and Erdogan certainly should do more to rein them in but he can .....be blamed for what generations of Turkish cops have grown up to do.

- And how does the EU justify its own crackdown on protests, especially what we saw, the protests against the financial crisis in Europe?

- Well, pure hypocrisy, it does not of course! You know, people got killed in Greek riots against the austerity measures, actually being pushed for by the European Union countries in Greece and nothing is said but in Turkey it gives an excuse to the Germans and the Austrians to slow things down, which makes Angela Merkel look good back home in Germany because she can say, Look! I am holding up the Turks coming in and appeal to her conservative constituency there.

So there is a lot of hypocrisy to go around here but I think that there is a general feeling that the crackdown in Istanbul has not revealed a good side of Erdogan’s policies which in some ways have actually been fairly progressive, he has been more prepared to talk to the Kurds and the Armenians and the others than many of his ultranationalist predecessors. But this seems to be disintegrating in what looks like traditional, almost Ottoman authoritarianism.