Turkey eyes political role, deals in Libya

REUTERS    by Ibon Villelabeitia

Hesitant at first to dump one-time friend Muammar Gaddafi and to back NATO operations, Turkey is taking a lead role in efforts to rebuild Libya now the Libyan leader is on the run, eyeing billion dollar deals and hoping to extend its influence in north Africa.

Muslim Turkey, a rising diplomatic and political power in the Middle East and in North Africa, had close political ties with Gaddafi and Turkish companies had projects worth more than $15 billion in the oil producing nation last year.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, who in February said NATO intervention in Libya was "out of the question," once received the Gaddafi International peace prize from Gaddafi himself.

But as the revolt spread, forcing the evacuation of thousands of Turks and leaving unfinished projects behind, and as Gaddafi grew more isolated internationally, Ankara shifted its position.

It reluctantly backed NATO operations, called on Gaddafi to step down and recognized the rebels as Libya's legitimate government. Ankara has provided the rebel National Transitional Council, the new masters of much of Libya, with $300 million in cash, loans and other aid.

Speaking at a Libya Contact Group meeting of senior diplomats in Istanbul Thursday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu urged the United Nations to unfreeze Libyan assets and pledged full international support for a stable, prosperous and democratic Libya.

Turkey's Libya road map in limbo as AU plan gains momentum

Hurriyet Daily News

As Ankara seeks international support for its 'road map' on the Libya crisis, an African Union peace initiative gains momentum, with Gadhafi accepting the plan and the EU backing the African leaders' efforts. A delegation of African heads of state meets Libyan rebel leaders in their stronghold of Benghazi to try to sell the plan.

With neither Libyan rebels nor Moammar Gadhafi’s regime giving a clear response to Turkey’s “road map” for the country, an African Union initiative for peace appears to be winning support.

A delegation of African leaders met Libyan rebels in their stronghold of Benghazi on Monday to try to sell a peace plan already accepted by Gadhafi. The spokesman for EU foreign-policy chief Catherine Ashton said the bloc also backs the African Union’s diplomatic efforts to bring a peaceful end to the conflict in Libya.
“There are a couple of proposals of road maps for Libya. What is important for us is to implement one of them immediately. But it seems that Gadhafi just wants to gain some time,” an official from the Turkish Foreign Ministry told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review on Monday.

Turkey and its region: Does Erdoğan have a plan?

The Economist

TURKEY'S mildly Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, thinks he can take credit for the wave of protests sweeping the Arab world. “Which country were they inspired by?” he asked the Turkish parliament recently. He answered his own question: Turkey, with its “advanced democracy”. The country's mix of secularism, free elections and European Union-tailored reforms has certainly raised its profile in its former Ottoman dominions. (Mr Erdoğan’s salvoes against Israel have gone down well too.) The prime minister was among the first world leaders to tell Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak, to step down.

So why has Turkey been so reluctant to back western efforts to stop Libya’s dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, from slaughtering his own people? The question has been burning in western capitals ever since Turkey balked at plans to erect a no-fly zone to protect Libyan civilians.

When the uprising in Libya erupted last month, Mr Erdoğan swiftly opposed any foreign intervention. He described the idea of NATO intervention as "absurd". He called on Colonel Qaddafi to resign but mistrusted Western motives, suggesting that Europeans and Americans were more interested in guzzling Libyan oil than saving Libyan lives. Their "real plan", whispered conspiratorially minded members of his ruling Justice and Development (AK) party, was nothing less than an “imperial carve-up” of the country.

Arab rulers must change or risk defeat: Turkey

REUTERS    Simon Cameron-Moore and Samia Nakhoul

LONDON - Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Wednesday a new era was sweeping the Middle East and it was up to its leaders to embrace change or risk being cast away.

He dismissed allegations by many Arab autocrats that an unprecedented wave of uprisings that toppled leaders in Tunisia and Egypt and inspired masses across Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria was the work of "foreign elements."

Davutoglu said the Middle East was passing through a political and social upheaval like that which gripped Eastern Europe in the 1990s and toppled a series of communist dictators.

"In the region there is an era of change," Davutoglu told Reuters in an interview. "It is like Eastern Europe in the late 1990s. Once there is a popular demand in a region, each country is being affected by these demands."
The world, he said, was changing and a young generation of Arabs "wanted more dignity, more economic prosperity and more democracy."

Turkey and France clash over Libya air campaign

Ian Traynor       Guardian 

Tension mounts over military action as Ankara accuses Sarkozy of pursuing French interests over liberation of Libyan people.

The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, accused France of seeing Libya as a source of 'oil, gold mines and underground treasures'

Turkey has launched a bitter attack on French president Nicolas Sarkozy's and France's leadership of the military campaign against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, accusing the French of lacking a conscience in their conduct in the Libyan operations.

The vitriolic criticism, from both the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the president, Abdullah Gül followed attacks from the Turkish government earlier this week and signalled an orchestrated attempt by Ankara to wreck Sarkozy's plans to lead the air campaign against Gaddafi.

With France insisting that Nato should not be put in political charge of the UN-mandated air campaign, Turkey has come out emphatically behind sole Nato control of the operations.

Libya: Nato to control no-fly zone after France gives way to Turkey

Ian Traynor & Nicholas Watt     The Guardian

Western allies and Turkey have secured a deal to put the entire military campaign against Muammar Gaddafi under Nato command by next week, UK and French sources have told the Guardian.

The US, Britain, France and Turkey agreed to put the three-pronged offensive – a no-fly zone, an arms embargo, and air strikes – under a Nato command umbrella, in a climbdown by France that accommodates strong Turkish complaints about the scope and control of the campaign.

The deal appeared to end days of infighting among western allies, but needed to be blessed by all 28 Nato member states. At the end of a four-day meeting of Nato ambassadors in Brussels, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the secretary general, said Nato had agreed to take command of the no-fly zone from the Americans.

Disputes have raged at Nato HQ every day this week. Rasmussen contradicted leading western officials by announcing that Nato's authority was limited to commanding the no-fly zone, but he signalled there was more negotiation to come.

The challenge of Libya: Where will it end? The Americans, the Europeans and the Arabs must all hold their nerve

The Economist


THE spectacle of American, British and French missiles pulverising an Arab and Muslim country at the dead of night arouses a sense of foreboding. Such ventures have too often begun with good intentions and naive overconfidence, as oil-rich despots see their armour crumple and burn beneath superior Western technology. Within weeks, though, vainglory turns into a costly and bloody quagmire.

Yet nobody could accuse Barack Obama and his allies, chiefly Britain’s David Cameron and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, of overconfidence in attacking Libya on March 19th. It is hard to think of a military enterprise that has been conceived in so much doubt and anxiety. What if Muammar Qaddafi sits out the raids in his bunker? What if Libya is partitioned? What if, chastened by news footage of dead women and children in a Tripoli market, the coalition starts to fall apart? What if many of the eastern Libyans whom the outside world is protecting turn out to sympathise with al-Qaeda? What if they go on to behave as murderously as the colonel and his paid killers?

Libya and Turkey: Ankara’s foreign policy goes off key

Howard Eissenstat*           Informed Comment


For a while, at least, Turkey seemed to be riding high as a wave of protests swept from Tunisia to Egypt to a half dozen other states in the Middle East and North Africa. After a few days of uncomfortable silence as protests were met with violence in Egypt, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan called on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to heed the will of his people and, using language meant to underline Turkey’s role as a regional leader, spoke in explicitly religious language to do so. The speech met with positive media coverage, both regionally and in the West, and Turkey’s image was burnished. Without giving too much thought about what the “Turkish model” might actually be, a lot of commentators suggested it might be a path for the region to take.

Of course, Erdoğan’s challenge to Mubarak was a relatively easy call. Mubarak was a rival to Erdoğan’s in his attempt to reframe Turkey as a regional powerhouse and the two were at odds over both Iran and Gaza. Moreover, Mubarak’s fall represented further proof that U.S. influence in the region was in decline and that the time was ripe for a more aggressive Turkish regional policy based on both shared values (democratic, Islamic, and anti-imperial) and a shared desire for economic development (preferably with Turkish companies leading the way). As Turkish Foreign Minister’s recent speech at Ahmet Davutoğlu at the al Jazeera Conference in Doha, this is how Turkey hopes to present itself within the region.

Cruel. Vainglorious. Steeped in blood. And now, surely, after more than four decades of terror and oppression, on his way out?

Robert Fısk     The Independent

So even the old, paranoid, crazed fox of Libya – the pallid, infantile, droop-cheeked dictator from Sirte, owner of his own female praetorian guard, author of the preposterous Green Book, who once announced he would ride to a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Belgrade on his white charger – is going to ground. Or gone. Last night, the man I first saw more than three decades ago, solemnly saluting a phalanx of black-uniformed frogmen as they flappered their way across the sulphur-hot tarmac of Green Square on a torrid night in Tripoli during a seven-hour military parade, appeared to be on the run at last, pursued – like the dictators of Tunis and Cairo – by his own furious people.

The YouTube and Facebook pictures told the story with a grainy, fuzzed reality, fantasy turned to fire and burning police stations in Benghazi and Tripoli, to corpses and angry, armed men, of a woman with a pistol leaning from a car door, of a crowd of students – were they readers of his literature? – breaking down a concrete replica of his ghastly book. Gunfire and flames and cellphone screams; quite an epitaph for a regime we all, from time to time, supported.