MHP leader Bahçeli calls European Parliament's anti-Turkey report "unfair and hostile"

A recent report on Turkey by the European Parliament was "unfair and hostile," the leader of a major Turkish political party said on Tuesday.

"At a time when Turkey sees EU membership as a strategic goal and (Turkey-EU) relations are progressing in a positive way, this report amounts to the denial of European values," Devlet Bahçeli, the head of Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), told his party's parliamentary group.

Rejecting the report that includes "criticism against Turkey in an unfair and hostile manner" and its accompanying resolution passed last week on Wednesday, Bahçeli said: "We return it to them in absentia, and we clearly condemn it."

"The report is a crusader organization aiming to suppress sovereign rights of Turkey and the Turkish nation," he added, arguing that the timing of their approval had been "specially chosen."

He was alluding to the May 19 Commemoration of Ataturk, Youth and Sports Day, a national holiday in Turkey marking the anniversary of when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk -- the founder of the Republic of Turkey -- arrived in the Black Sea city of Samsun from Istanbul in 1919 to launch the four-year War of Independence that later transformed the nation into modern Turkey.