The Crooked Logic of “The Sultan”, Op-ed

The position and vision of Turkish “Sultan” Recep Tayyip Erdogan of what is happening in Libya can only be described as an expression of a crooked logic, Dr. Salem Al-Ketbi, an UAE writer and analyst, says

Indeed, Turkey rejects any Arab role in an Arab country and justifies for itself its hateful colonial intervention in Libya, Syria, and Iraq as maintenance and protection of Turkish national security!

Double standards, distortion of reality, mixing up and manipulation of facts, and attempts to deceive ordinary people, are all true and expressive descriptions of Turkey’s crooked logic in the issues of the Arab region.

It is proven that Turkey is a former colonial power, and if we assume - as the Sultan and his court argue - that each colonial power has the right to interfere in its former colonies, the world will turn into an arena of chaos and violations to international law and legitimacy, which the international community has accepted as a rule for the behavior of States in the post-World War II era and after the liquidation of the colonial era.

Erdogan denounces Egypt's role in Libya, and describes Cairo's support for the Libyan national army as “illegal”, while he justifies the intervention of his army, militia, and mercenaries in this Arab country by saying “our relations with Libya go back to more than 500 years, and we will not leave our Libyan brothers alone ... we will continue to bear the responsibility that we assumed on our shoulders in Libya as we have done to this day”.

The truth is that the statements of the “Sultan” mean an open return to the colonial era, during which the Libyan people suffered at the hands of the ancient Ottomans in the sixteenth century.

Going back to history, I do not know the secret of Erdogan's talk about the “necessity” of being in Libya and fighting there “now”, nor of his saying that a million Turks are living in Libya now!

There is no explanation for this except for his complete obedience to the calls of his allies, the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood members, and their fallacies in falsifying the history of States and they are trying to legalize the new Ottoman colonialism, as if more than three centuries of occupation are not enough to plunder the wealth of the Libyan people, nor are the killings, massacres, and other documented accounts that fill the books of trusted historians about the practices of the Ottomans in Libya, and as if that were not enough for a new Ottoman to return to this Arab country with new ambitions and old dreams!

Stories of the Ottoman crimes in Libya are classified as ones of the ugliest colonial times throughout history, and there is no room here to tell even a few of them because of the horrific violations and crimes they contain.

It does not take much to recall them; it is as simple as pressing a button on the famous search engine “Google” to know the horrors and crimes of that abhorrent era. But the dilemma is that the “Sultan” sometimes forgets that peoples have a living memory and that such crimes do not fall from the collective consciousness of peoples even if they have become imprescriptible criminally speaking.

The "Sultan" talks about Libya as if it were a Turkish protectorate, and he says that Turkey “will not allow any reckless action in Libya,” while Turkish officials warn of the consequences of the deployment of any Egyptian forces in Libya, as “it will pose a threat to Cairo itself”.

On this matter, the adviser to the Turkish President says that any intervention in Libya will be a “dangerous military adventure for Egypt”, a talk that expresses only the Ottoman arrogance that cannot be accepted by Arabs because it reflects an unprecedented level of boldness and transgression towards the Arab peoples and their dignity, as well as an exposure of the dimensions of the Turkish regional whose aim is to grab many Arab lands, wealth, and rights, and it seems clear that Turkey is now seeking to implement this project on its own after it has sought and failed to implement it since 2011 through its proxies from the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood organization.

Turkey indeed has the right to protect its interests and defend its national security, but that does not mean at all seizing wrongfully the rights, resources, and wealth of the Arab people, and the violation of the lands of Syria, Iraq, and Libya with different claims and various lies.

The Turkish occupation of parts of the lands of these three countries must stop and Turkey's ambitions for gas and oil at the expense of the Arab peoples must end, and we must remember that the Turkish National Security claimers have now stood powerless many times, especially when it comes to Israel, which bombed the ship “Marmara” and killed Turkish activists in 2010 without a Turkish reaction despite the apparent anger and noise after the incident!

The truth that should be recognized is that Turkey is now expanding in our region for several reasons, including the absence of the collective Arab project and the collapse of the national State in major Arab countries.

But the fact that Turkey is also benefiting from Arab mistakes which allowed for its presence ad intervention in Syria and Libya should not be ignored either.

These mistakes include the hesitation and failure of the mechanisms of collective Arab action that allowed Syria to be excluded from this system and the related consecration of the Arab leadership vacuum experienced by the crises in our region.

What the current Turkish politicians should remember is that the Libyan people cannot trust the intentions of the new Ottoman Sultan, even if he claims that he protects their interests and defends their wealth, because the Libyans did not get rid of Gaddafi to fall into the clutches of the old colonial!