Hamburg - German Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected Monday a proposal from Ankara to provide Turkish-trained teachers on secondment to educate minority children in German public schools. Merkel said she had made that clear to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he made the proposal to her on a visit Friday. Teachers in Germany have to be German-trained.
Although secondary schools with foreign languages as the medium of tuition already exist in Germany, Erdogan's proposal prompted an outcry from both the left and right in the country.
Erdogan said German-language schools and colleges already existed in Turkey, so the converse was desirable in Germany. He said Ankara could supply the teachers.
Speaking in the northern city of Hamburg, Merkel said, "There are already a whole range of German-Turkish secondary schools here, and there is nothing at all to object to about that. I expressed my objections to Turkish teachers coming to Germany."
The chancellor said she would support "ethnic Turkish people who have grown up here in Germany going into teaching because the young people know the problems of integration."
She added, "I'm open about more schools offering Turkish as a second language, just like they offer English or French or Chinese." But she would reject "a child here going to a Turkish-language school where they learn German as their fifth foreign language."
In a veiled response to a political speech in Cologne the previous day to nearly 20,000 cheering Turks, Merkel said she had told minority youth last week she was responsible for them in Germany, not Erdogan.
"I told the young people: if you grow up in Germany in the third or fourth generation, if most of you have German citizenship, then I am your chancellor.
"If you have a concern, then this concern is just as important to me as it is to someone who can say they 500 years of German ancestry," she said.
"The German government is responsible for these people, without them sacrificing their cultural plurality."
She said also rejected Erdogan's criticism of German efforts to "assimilate" the ethnic minority in his Cologne speech.
"We will have to continue debating our understanding of integration issues with the Turkish prime minister," she said.
"I am pleased he pronounces himself in favour of integration and learning the German language, but long-term life in a country also involves a stronger acceptance of its habits. I don't think we have reached the end of this debate."
