Erdogan cancels German trip, protests still planned

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan canceled a trip to Germany on Saturday following the death of 12 Turkish soldiers in Afghanistan, but police warned thousands still planned to protest against a decision to award him a prize for tolerance. Erdogan had been due to receive the Steiger Award in the western German town of Bochum but his office said he had called off his trip because of the soldiers’ deaths in a NATO helicopter crash near Kabul on Friday. German police said up to 30,000 people from local Kurdish and Armenian groups who oppose the policies of Erdogan’s ruling AK party were going ahead anyway with planned protests. People from the Alevi minority were also expected to join the protest. The Steiger Award association said the award was intended to mark 50 years of German-Turkish friendship. Before the trip was canceled, a leading German conservative had criticized the decision to award a prize for tolerance to Erdogan, citing what he called a lack of press freedom and the “suppressing” of religious and ethnic minorities in Turkey. Alexander Dobrindt, general secretary of the Christian Social Union (CSU), which is part of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right coalition government, said it would be more appropriate to award Erdogan a prize for intolerance. Erdogan had not been due to meet Merkel during Saturday’s trip. On previous visits he has irked Berlin with his calls to Germany’s large ethnic Turkish community not to assimilate or forget their roots.