Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan urged Germany on Thursday to take measures to counter discrimination against its large Turkish population, saying his own relatives in the country feared for their safety. In an interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Erdogan also criticized German Chancellor Angela Merkel for not joining him for an event in Cologne last month attended by thousands of German Turks. The comments promised to overshadow a government-sponsored Islam Conference being held on Thursday in Berlin that is designed to help foster the integration of Germany's 3.2 million Muslims. The vast majority are of Turkish origin. “The German government must take severe measures,” Erdogan told the newspaper. “I have relatives in Germany and they tell me: we are scared.” Erdogan was responding to a question about a house fire last month that killed nine people of Turkish origin in Ludwigshafen. The Turkish media has speculated that the fire was a racially-motivated attack, but German prosecutors have virtually ruled out arson as the cause of the blaze, which killed five children and a pregnant woman. Nazi Symbols Erdogan, who visited the site of the fire last month, said he had seen Nazi symbols on the door of the house. During the trip, Erdogan spoke to a crowd of around 16,000 people of mainly Turkish origin in Cologne and urged them to resist assimilation, sparking criticism from Merkel and other members of her government. In the newspaper interview, Erdogan criticised the chancellor for not participating in the event. “At first she wanted to come but then she backed away and suggested a panel with school children in the chancellery,” Erdogan said. – Reuters However, a senior German official who requested anonymity denied Merkel had ever agreed to attend the Cologne event, saying it had been arranged by Erdogan's people without consulting Berlin. A poll published on Wednesday showed nearly four in five of Germany's Turks have lost faith in Merkel, who came into office vowing to foster better ties with the 2.7 million people of Turkish origin living in Germany. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who is representing the government at Thursday's “integration summit”, acknowledged that more needed to be done to make Muslims feel at home in Germany, but hit out at Erdogan for telling Turks to resist becoming part of German society. “I'm not insisting that all Turks become Germans - but when they want to become German citizens they cannot remain Turkish,” Schaeuble told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung. After the last Islam Conference in May 2007, representatives of the country's Muslim community criticized it for being little more than a debating forum that lacked clear goals. __
