Turkey looks to the east, ending EU flirtation
“A Palestinian child crying in Gaza wrenches a mother’s heart in Ankara,” Erdogan told the Arab League in Cairo yesterday, using language calculated to delight Arab masses.
His message of how Turks and Arabs twang to the same emotions would have seemed alien to a previous Turkey, friendly with its US military ally, keen to join the European Union and disdainful of a “backwards” Middle East on its doorstep.
The so-called Turkish model has fascinated Arabs for several years, although no Arab country has emulated its mix of secular democracy, Islamist leadership and economic success.
Yet Turkey’s role is uncertain in a region in which popular revolts are jolting many Arab nations, including some of Ankara’s favoured political and business partners, Libya and Syria.
“All (Turkey’s) moves against Israel are only meant to promote itself as a political power in the Arab region and spread its influence on the new generation of the Arab youth who are longing for change and power,” said Nabil Abdel Fattah, at Cairo’s al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
Turkey feels jilted by the EU and less crucial to NATO since the Cold War ended, spurring Erdogan to seek new friends and markets in the Middle East.
Erdogan’s rhetoric — he also said UN recognition of a Palestinian state was an obligation — resonates with Arabs, as well as his Islamist political base at home.
Egyptians cheered him after he landed at Cairo airport on Monday. Many Arabs admire him for his repeated tangles with Israel since he angrily left a platform he had shared in Davos with Israeli president Shimon Peres in 2009.
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood also applauds Erdogan’s reforms as head of an Islamist-based party that has neutered the political clout of Turkey’s secularist generals, even as the Turkish economy powers ahead.
Erdogan’s personal popularity with Arabs has also soared.
A Pew Research Centre survey conducted in March-April showed that 78% of Egyptians had confidence in him. Nearly 95% of Israelis took the opposite view.
And that was before the Turkish leader expelled the Israeli ambassador last week after Israel refused to apologise for last year’s killing of nine Turks by Israeli commandos who halted an aid ship trying to break an Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Erdogan then said Turkish warships would escort any such future flotillas to Gaza — alarming the US as well as Israel.
Such combativeness has long been absent from the Arab League, which never confronted Israel during president Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule, when the ousted Egyptian leader was bent on preserving Cairo’s peace treaty with the Jewish state.
For an outsider to champion the Palestinian cause, as non-Arab Iran has also done, can raise the hackles of Arab leaders, but given their own lack of weight, they can hardly complain.
“Some people talk about Turkey having the ambition of going back to the old Ottoman role, but in Saudi Arabia the majority do not think this way,” said Saudi analyst Khalid al-Dakhil.
“At this point, Arab states are weak, so you can’t avoid Turkey having this leading role in the region,” he said.
For some of his Turkish critics, Erdogan’s foreign policy is a shambles of ambiguity and instability. Turkey opposed Western intervention in Libya, and was slow to recognise those who ended Muammar Gaddafi’s 42 years in power. Now Erdogan must woo Libya’s new rulers to protect Turkish interests.
In Syria, Erdogan befriended president Bashar al-Assad and built new political and economic ties with a once-hostile neighbour.
The bloodshed in Syria goes on, but some Syrians prefer Erdogan’s stance to the Arab League’s muted approach.
“Erdogan has turned into an Arab hero,” said Samer Zaher, a Syrian from Homs, a hotbed of anti-Assad sentiment. “We have not found a leader as powerful as him asking Assad to leave and calling him an illegitimate president.”
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