Turkey not pleased with neo-Ottoman label
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu lashed out Sunday against the use of the term “neo-Ottomanism,” while admitting it is understandable for Balkan countries to maintain certain reservations about greater involvement by Turkey in the region.-
“For us, the Balkans represents a geography gradually lost over an extended period of some 215 years since the Treaty of Karlowitz, and where a memory was left behind with each loss … During the last two years, our profile has been raised on every issue in the Balkans,” Davutoğlu said during an official trip to Kosovo as part of a Balkans tour.
“We straightened [out] our relations with countries that seemed the most problematic, especially with Serbia. Turkey suddenly turned from a country that supported one country against another, and which was forced to protect a minority, to a country that has developed a vision comprising the whole of the Balkans. And this brought along some reactions,” the foreign minister said.
Such reactions come from the generation that grew up under Albania’s Enver Hoca and Yugoslavia’s Marshall Tito, Davutoğlu said, adding that both countries were founded on settling accounts with the former Ottoman period.
“We see this [these reactions] as a childhood affliction. I say this not in a disdainful sense, but in the sense of the birth of a state. Mature states, states that have overcome [this affliction] would not approach these things in a reactive manner. As such, I regard reactions that could be born out of Turkey’s increasing influence in the Balkans as being normal,” Davutoğlu said, while indicating there are some ill-willed reactions toward Turkey in the region as well.
“The ill-willed reaction is the [use of the] expression ‘neo-Ottomanism.’ I have rejected this at every opportunity, but some people intentionally use this term to awaken fear and the old instinct of settling accounts in order to minimize our increasing influence in the region,” he said. “Such reactions, however, are not to be found among all sections of society here. The elite in Turkey also used to entertain such ideas at one point. Seeing the Ottomans as the history of a regressive period, settling accounts with history is something that appears with the formation of the nation-state.”
Foreign Ministry objects to AKP poster in Mamusa
Davutoğlu was greeted with excitement and enthusiasm by the Albanian and Turkish communities in Kosovo, where he visited the Turkish battalion serving in Prizren, as well as the Anatolia Primary School built by Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency, or TİKA, in Mamusa, a town whose entire population is Turkish, during the second day of his visit.
A Foreign Ministry official said it would be more appropriate in terms of protocols if a poster bearing a symbol of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, hung on the building were replaced with a banner that did not bear the symbols of any political parties. The organizers of the event said they had no other appropriate images.
August 28, 2011
SOURCE: HURRIYET DAILY NEWS
