ISTANBUL: Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an outspoken supporter of Egypt’s ousted president Mohammed Mursi, lashed out at the European Union and others for failing to condemn strongly enough the killing of dozens in Cairo earlier yesterday.
Security forces shot dead dozens of Mursi supporters yesterday, days after the army called for a popular mandate to wipe out “violence and terrorism” following its removal of Egypt’s first democratically government on July 3. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, said she “deeply deplores” the deaths and called for a halt in violence.
But Erdogan, who has recently faced large street protests calling for his own government to quit, accused the EU of double standards for questioning the use of police teargas in Turkey but not the shooting deaths of protesters in Cairo.
“Those who were silent when Egypt’s national will was massacred are silent again when people are massacred. What happened to the EU (and) European values, where are those who go around giving lessons in democracy?” Erdogan said in a speech to a group of businessmen in Istanbul in televised comments.
“Where is the United Nations? Where are those who created a brouhaha when Turkish police, in a completely justified and legitimate way, used water (cannon) and pepper spray now when there is a coup and a massacre in Egypt,” he said.
The EU, which Turkey seeks to join, and the United States both criticised the police crackdown on Turkey’s fiercest anti-government protests in decades. Five people died in clashes. Erdogan’s rule has been marked by his efforts to garner Turkey diplomatic clout in the Middle East.
Erdogan’s comments were made before US Secretary of State John Kerry, treading a fine line with an Arab ally that receives over $1bn a year in US military aid, urged Egyptian authorities to respect the right to peaceful protest.
Washington has decided to avoid the tricky question of whether the toppling of Mursi was a coup, which would have forced a freeze of $1.5bn in aid. “The law does not require us to make a formal determination... as to whether a coup took place, and it is not in our national interest to make such a determination,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Friday.
“We believe that the continued provision of assistance to Egypt, consistent with our law, is important to our goal of advancing a responsible transition to democratic governance and is consistent with our national security interest,” Psaki told reporters.
Agencies
