RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14389/turkey-sudan-ally

Erdogan’s close ties to Bashir appear to have had the goal of expanding Turkey’s economic and military influence in Africa as well as in the Gulf. After the ouster of Bashir, however, all of Turkey’s endeavors in Sudan, including a key Turkish strategic project on the Red Sea, could now be in jeopardy — bad news for a Turkish government that already facing serious economic problems.

Bashir granted Erdoğan the use, near Egypt and Saudi Arabia, of Suakin Island, a Sudanese port city in the Red Sea…. The Turkish press reported that Ankara was preparing to build a “military base” on the island, which would turn it into the “second Turkish eye in the Mediterranean after Cyprus.”

According to the Turkish financial newspaper, Dünya, billion-dollar business deals — including Turkey’s investment in a new airport in Khartoum, as well as in the fields of agriculture, textiles, and oil — could also be in jeopardy.

The April 11 military coup that ousted Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir after 30 years of Islamist rule seems to have the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan extremely worried.

The Turkish government, in its attempts to prop up Bashir’s ailing government, had invested heavily in Sudan. The ouster of Bashir, after months-long protests, has thrown the cooperation between the Turkish and Sudanese regimes in intelligence, economics and military, among other matters, into uncertainty.

Although Turkey is a member of NATO with long-standing aspirations to become part of the European Union — while Bashir came to power in 1989 by overthrowing Sudan’s democratically elected government and was later indicted by the International Criminal Court as a war criminal — Erdoğan and his loyalists are blaming the United States, Israel and other “global powers” for toppling their ally.

Turkish newspapers aligned with Erdoğan are even claiming that Bashir’s ouster was indirectly aimed at Ankara. The reason for this false accusation is that Sudan — which borders Egypt and Libya, and is close to Saudi Arabia — has held both strategic and political significance for Turkey. Erdogan’s close ties to Bashir appear to have had the goal of expanding Turkey’s economic and military influence in Africa as well as in the Gulf. After the ouster of Bashir, however, all of Turkey’s endeavors in Sudan, including a key Turkish strategic project on the Red Sea, could now be in jeopardy — bad news for a Turkish government that already facing serious economic problems.

https://www.andrewbostom.org/2010/08/uriel-heyd-on-turkeys-re-islamization-circa-

Professor Uriel Heyd (d. 1968) described Turkey’s tenuous secularization and aggressive re-Islamization fully 42 years before todays “learned analysts” have finally come to the same pathetically belated realization…

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Since the recent Mavi Marmara flotilla affair—facilitated, and perhaps even orchestrated by the Turkish government—we have been inundated with excruciatingly belated, if not downright delinquent hand-wringing assessments by so-called “expert analysts” of Turkey. These “experts” lament what they view as Turkey’s “precipitous” return to Islamic fundamentalism under the current Erdogan-led AKP regime—as if this dangerous phenomenon emerged suddenly and fully formed from the head of Zeus al-Zawahiri.

A sobering, highly informed corrective to this cacophony of ill-informed Johnny and Janey-Come –Lately “learned analyst” voices was provided by the Israeli scholar of Ottoman and Republican Turkey, Professor Uriel Heyd (1913-1968)—just over forty-two years ago!

First, a brief biography of Heyd, derived from Professor Gabriel Baer’s opening tribute and Preface (pp. 5-6) to Heyd’s “Revival of Islam in Modern Turkey,” The Magnes Press, Jerusalem, 1968, pp. 5-27, and Professor Aharon Layish’s, “Uriel Heyd’s Contribution to the Study of the Legal, Religious, Cultural, and Political History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey,” Bulletin of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1982, pp. 35-54.