President Gül’s timely Egyptian visit

I criticized President Abdullah Gül in this column recently for appearing extremely supportive of his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, during his recent official visit to Tehran. That visit took place while the mullah regime in that country was brutalizing anti-government protestors on the streets of the capital, and I still stand by the view that this did not present a good picture either for Gül or for Turkey.

Gül was of course reported as having called on his Iranian interlocutors to be more tolerant of the opposition, which continues to be hounded more than ever in that country today. But his voice in this regard was somewhat muted, clearly with a view to not sullying the atmosphere of his official visit.

My personal experiences of Gül over the years, especially when he was foreign minister before being elected president,  has nevertheless proved to me that he is a liberal and tolerant man at heart who is democratic by nature and values human rights.  

He is also one of the first leaders from a predominantly Islamic country to have called on Islamic leaders in the region to move in the direction of democracy and to respect the natural rights of their people if they wanted to free their countries from economic and social backwardness.

Gül has also demonstrated his democratic credentials at home, especially with his annual speeches when Parliament is opened. He has come out in strong support of the democratic values enshrined in Turkey’s EU perspective.

One has to therefore consider Gül to be a force for the good. This is also why I would have expected him to be more openly vocal in Tehran than he actually was when exhorting the regime there to be tolerant.

One can naturally understand that he has to consider Turkey’s material interests, and that his visit to Iran was essentially spurred on by this consideration. The fact that he was accompanied by a very large contingent of Turkish businessmen on that visit also attests to this fact.

Serving the national interests is, of course, nothing new or strange in international affairs. Despite my own criticism of him in this regard, I believe that Western governments do not have the right to mount any moral high horse over his visit to Iran – which in all honesty they did not.

It would have been rather contradictory for them to do so anyway given the revelations now about how the brutal Moammar Gadhafi regime in Libya was propped up by the West over the years because of their oil interests, and with scant consideration for the welfare of the Libyan people.

The timely visit that Gül paid to Egypt on Thursday, on the other hand, is something that should be looked on positively by all those who are interested in seeing that country attain the democratic values desired by its people after they successfully toppled the Mubarak regime.

The semi-official Anatolian News Agency reported before Gül traveled to Cairo that his intention while there was “to display solidarity with the Egyptian state and the Egyptian people.” It also indicated that he would hold high-level talks with the head of the Supreme Military Council,  which is provisionally running that country until the necessary groundwork for fair elections is prepared.

There have been visits to Egypt by Western leaders and officials since the popular uprising there, of course, one of them being the high-profile visit by Britain’s David Cameron, whose support for the Egyptian people was welcomed warmly on the streets of Cairo as we saw from TV news reports.

It is clear, however, that Gül’s Egyptian interlocutors must have listened to him on Thursday from a very different perspective, and possibly with much greater interest, given that he represents a country whose population is predominantly Muslim and yet has managed to show that Islam and democracy are not incompatible.

This is after all what Egyptians will also try and achieve now, regardless of whether they do it according to the “Turkish model,” or according to a model specific to their own sociological realities, which in the end is more likely to happen whatever inspiration they may draw from Turkey.

The fact that Turkey is a country which has had to cope with anti-democratic military interventions in the past, and now has a government with an Islamic orientation that has effectively forced the same military to withdraw to behind democratic lines, will also have increased the interest in Gül’s visit among ordinary Egyptians.

While the average Egyptian, like the average Turk, has respect for the nation’s military as an institution, this does not mean that people in Turkey or in Egypt want the military to get involved in politics and undermine democratic values and the hard-gained advances made in this regard.

Gül, in fact, made his views about developments in Egypt known to journalists on his plane as he was traveling to Tehran recently for his official visit. These views have been reported and give us and idea of what he must have said in Cairo during his talks with officials there on Thursday.

Gül reportedly told journalists on the plane that Egypt “is a great country with a deep civilization whose place in international fora should be much better than it is.” He also praised the Egyptian army for the great contribution it made to preventing bloodshed among brothers during the recent demonstration and went on to add the following:

“Now we are in a state of transition. There is the need for a proper constitution, and fair elections. The people and state of Egypt must come out of this transition period much stronger. If the system is rotten it does not matter if the public is strong. It is not possible to achieve anything with a rotten system.”

There is no doubt this was the bottom line in terms of what he transmitted to his Egyptian hosts on Thursday. One can expect, given prevailing circumstances and his complimentary remarks about the Egyptian people and military, that his remarks were generally welcomed.

This is the kind of role that we expect a liberal and democratically oriented person like Gül, who has respect for human rights, to play in the region. It does him and Turkey much more credit than appearing to “chummy” with leaders whose democratic credentials are highly questionable, if they exist at all.