.....BY COUP IN
EGYPT
If
there is one place on earth where the effects of the July 3 military coup in EGYPT
were felt as much as in Cairo by deposed president Mohammed Morsi and his
Muslim Brotherhood, it must be TURKEY.
COUP IN EGYPT CAME AS AN ADDITIONAL TREMOR TO PRIME MINISTER
RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN
As
Ankara coped with the trauma of the events in Istanbul and most other parts of
the country, the military coup in EGYPT came as an additional tremor to Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party
(AKP). It so shook Erdogan that he interrupted his much-needed holiday and
returned to work, convening his top aides and within 48 hours launching a
vigorous campaign of criticism against the West, especially EUROPE, for not
acknowledging the EGYPTIAN coup as a coup.
TURKISH
Islamists are living the EGYPTIAN coup not as a coup in EGYPT but as profoundly
as a coup against themselves in TURKEY.… The EGYPTIAN military’s unseating of
Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood also serves as a dose of palliative care that
AKP rule needs badly given its own traumas, especially the Taksim-Gezi
protests. Erdogan and his fellow party members have again retreated to the
shelter of victimhood and legality, two themes they voice
persistently. The AKP has successfully employed the theme
of “victimhood’ in its claim that it represents the “black TURKS” against
the “white TURKS,” and its leaders always aver that to come to power through
elections is the source of legitimacy for a political movement that has
victimhood as its starting point.
THE BALLOT BOX IS THE CHASTITY OF DEMOCRACY
In
a speech on July 5, Erdogan, while rejecting the military coup in EGYPT,
justifiably emphasized that an elected Morsi and Muslim Brotherhood government
must be deposed through elections. He frequently repeated, “The ballot box is
the chastity of democracy.” Two TURKISH dailies under strict government control
used the expression for banner headlines the following day.
The
TURKISH public and certainly the ruling party apparently did not pay much
attention to the June 30 gathering of record numbers of people in Tahrir Square
and elsewhere in EGYPT to demand Morsi’s resignation and did not feel that
given Morsi’s autocratic tendencies, the June 30, 2012, elections that brought
him to power may well have been the last elections for EGYPT for quite some
time.
The principle that those who enter by elections must go with
elections was cited as a sine qua non of democracy. This serves to reinforce
the democratic legitimacy of the Muslim Brotherhood government in EGYPT and AKP
rule in TURKEY. It also helps in resuscitating the theme of victimhood that the
AKP finds highly useful.
There
is another functional aspect of this approach. Erdogan and his supporters want
to believe and demonstrate that the Taksim-Gezi events in Istanbul were a
product of “foreign forces,” an international plot seeking to topple Erdogan by
preparing the ground for a military coup. The July 3 Egyptian coup is therefore
presented as a (self-fulfilling) prophecy of Erdogan’s Taksim-Gezi narrative.
Background Information:
ERDOGAN
SUGGESTS: TURMOIL IS ORCHESTRATED BY FOREIGN SOURCES
Further articles related to above topic:
The
AKP and its propagandists also latched on to the EGYPTIAN coup as a life
preserver in an attempt to recoup the moral high ground they lost because of
the Taksim-Gezi events. In the meantime, some of the liberal-democrat
intellectuals in TURKEY who had supported the Taksim-Gezi protesters, and were
distancing themselves from the AKP to avoid being seen as supporting a military
coup, went to such great pains in denouncing the events in EGYPT that their
support for Taksim-Gezi appeared to have been meaningless.
TURKEY’S GRANDEST DREAM — THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A
TURKEY- EGYPT AXIS IN THE REGION.
Thus
on one side of the coin, the military coup in EGYPT paradoxically represented
something of a magic cure for the AKP. On the other side of the coin, however,
the worst loses accrued to TURKEY’S AKP as much as to the EGYPTIAN Muslim
Brotherhood.
There
is no threat whatsoever to the AKP's grip on government. This is the basic
difference between EGYPT and TURKEY. That said, the overthrow of Muslim
Brotherhood rule in EGYPT denies the AKP the chance to fulfill one of its
goals, which is also Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's grandest dream — the
establishment of a TURKEY-EGYPT axis in the region. The AKP and Muslim
Brotherhood's ideological kinship was to have played a determinant role in the
realization of this dream.
TURKEY GRANTED A FIVE-YEAR, $1 BILLION LOAN TO EGYPT WITH NO
REPAYMENT FOR THE FIRST THREE YEARS
That
is why TURKEY had chosen to use its soft power most generously for the benefit
of the Brotherhood government. While the Morsi administration was struggling to
obtain a $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund in fall 2012,
the Erdogan government granted a five-year, $1 billion loan to EGYPT with no
repayment for the first three years. This is a massive amount of money for both
countries.
In the six months that elapsed since then, the expectation
was that as a consequence of TURKEY’S largesse to EGYPT, Morsi and his
Brotherhood would decide to emulate the Erdogan AKP of 2002–2011 to prove the
theory that Islam and democracy can coexist. The opposite, however, occurred,
with Erdogan beginning to look more like Morsi, and the AKP beginning to
resemble the Muslim Brotherhood ideologically.
This
is why the overthrow of the Brotherhood came as such a severe shock to the
AKP. The party’s self-confidence — driven by its successes in power and
increasingly morphing into arrogance — was shaken, and in terms of realpolitik,
TURKEY’S power, influence and room for maneuver in the region was significantly
curtailed. One cannot now speak of a TURKEY-EGYPT axis.
THE OUSTING OF THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD FROM POWER WILL ALSO
NEGATIVELY AFFECT TURKEY’S SYRIA POLICY.
It
is an unquestionable reality that the developments in EGYPT have allowed the
Damascus regime to breathe much more easily.
Background Information:
TURKEY WOULD MAKE A
SIGNIFICANT CONTRIBUTION TO THE RESOLUTION OF THE SYRIAN CRISIS IF IT COULD
BRING ITSELF TO RISE ABOVE THE SECTARIAN CONSIDERATIONS THAT HAVE DICTATED ITS
REGIME CHANGE POLICY IN SYRIA. At:
FROM FRIEND TO FOE, WHAT
CAUSED THE SHIFT IN TURKEYS SYRIA STRATEGY? At:
The
AKP that tended to correlate its Palestine and regional policy with Hamas will
now have a tough time given the seismic aftershocks of the end of Muslim
Brotherhood rule on its Gazan neighbor. One
of the first victims of the military coup was the postponement of Erdogan’s
visit to Gaza, once considered crucial to the revitalization of his political
fortunes.
The
spread of resistance to the military coup in EGYPT and the possibility of
Muslim Brothers returning to power seem a grand hope and dream for the AKP, but
this is an excessively optimistic outcome that is all but impossible to predict
and may entail unwanted developments, including a civil war. While the EGYPTIAN
events offered some relief to Erdogan and his party, it is hoped that they are
able to read and grasp the realities of EGYPT that cannot but be demoralizing
for them.
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