- December 28 2017
By MURAT YETKİN
murat.yetkin@hurriyet.com.tr
The end of neo-Ottomanism?
Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan’s Africa tour, which covered Sudan, Chad and Tunisia, took place right after a successful move in the United Nations, in which he played an important role by motivating the Islamic Cooperation Organization (OIC) against the United States’ recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
Before the objection of 128 countries in the U.N. General Assembly, the Istanbul declaration of the OIC united rivals such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar, despite warnings from the U.S.
But the spirit brought by Jerusalem did not stop the anti-Turkish rhetoric among the Arab governments. Despite a recent war of words last week between Abu Dhabi and Ankara over an Ottoman general, Fahreddin Pasha, who defended Medina and Jerusalem against British armies and had to leave after the defeat in the First World War, UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash signaled that the anti-Turkish sentiment was still in place. In his tweets on Dec. 27, Gargash called on the Arab world to unite around a “Riyadh-Cario axis” against what he claims an “Ankara-Tehran” one. That was after a statement by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who said the rhetoric about a Turkey-Iran-Qatar axis was not true.
