Erdoğan Reiterates Refusal To Accept Egypt's Sisi As Legitimate

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on Monday that he will not accept Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as legitimate, and lambasted the countries that recognized his legitimacy.

Erdoğan said he turned down the offers of some countries' leaders who suggested the Turkish president reconcile with Sisi during the Second Turkey-Africa Partnership Summit last week.

“I said I will not reconcile [with Sisi] or accept him [as legitimate],” Erdoğan said while addressing a meeting of an association promoting women's rights in Ankara.

Turkey fiercely criticized the coup that overthrew former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi last year. Former military leader Sisi toppled Morsi, who was elected in a free vote in July 2013, only a year after Morsi came to power. Turkey had forged a close alliance with Morsi before his ousting.

Erdoğan also recalled a massacre in August 2013 when 3,000 Morsi supporters were murdered in Egypt, saying none of the former Egyptian leaders did anything like this.

“Those people were killed in one day. … What did countries calling themselves democratic say? Did they speak up? Even if you [those countries] accept Sisi as legitimate, we will not. That's the difference between us,” Erdoğan said.

Back in September, the Turkish president also directed his criticism at the UN, as Sisi was allowed to address at United Nations General Assembly. Taking the podium at the UN shortly after Sisi, Erdoğan said the democratically elected Morsi, a member of the Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood, was toppled by a coup and that the UN chose to legitimize Sisi, who conducted the coup, by giving him a chance to speak at the UN.

Erdoğan slams anti-seal hunt activists over silence on Syria, Gaza

During his speech on Monday, Erdoğan once again criticized international responses to crises in Gaza and Syria, saying those who protest “the slightest of human rights violations” in certain countries or turn seal hunting into a “global issue” are silent in the face of tragedies in Gaza and Syria.

“You see that those who make a global issue out of the hunting of seals do not show the slightest sensitivity toward the massacre of thousands of women and children in Syria and Gaza,” Erdoğan said. “More than 300,000 people have been killed in Syria, but there is still no reaction from the world. I talk to them [world leaders] but I get no response.”

Erdoğan's seal hunting comments follow controversial remarks by a Turkish businessmen who said his company controls more than 80 percent of the world's seal fur trade. In response to criticism from Western animal rights groups targeting his company, which reportedly kills about 200,000 seals every year, the businessman, Hatem Yavuz, launched a new brand called “Fok You.”

Yavuz himself brushed aside criticism against him in remarks published last week, also saying that his critics ignore tragedies occurring in Gaza and Syria while he himself had recently visited Gaza and currently employs three Syrians.

(Cihan/Today's Zaman)