Chat: Egypt, Turkey, Muslim Brotherhood, and Women's Rights

Dalia Ziada and Hediye Levent chat about Egypt, Turkey, Muslim Brotherhood, and Women's Rights

Watch the original video (live stream) in Turkish on Hediye Levent's YouTube channel here 

The United States Scramble for Africa

The United States Administration of President Biden is assertively pushing the reset button on its foreign policy in Africa. However, its potential to outpace other regional and international competitors over the resources of the most fertile continent is still pretty limited.  

In mid-December, Washington hosted a three-day summit under the title US-Africa Leaders Summit, calling in forty-nine political leaders from Sub-Sahara and North Africa and the Commissioner of the African Union to discuss ways to revive and enhance America’s socio-economic partnerships with the continent. A senior U.S. official told the press that “the summit is rooted in the recognition that Africa is a key geopolitical player and one that is shaping our present and will shape our future.” Indeed, Africa is a fertile continent with an unparalleled wealth of minerals and fuels. It is also home to 1.3 billion people, most of whom are youth, offering an enormous market of lucrative business opportunities to foreign investors. 

The overdue summit is the second episode of a historic meeting that former U.S. President Barak Obama held eight years ago, in August 2014, under the same title. The theme of the two summits and the agenda items are almost identical, but America’s geo-strategic standing and the surrounding global context are quite different. While the 2014 summit had prioritized discussions on civil society, good governance, and democratization, the current summit pushed these critical topics down the list after strategic economic partnerships, food security, and response to the climate crisis.

The Business Forum is the star of the show in this year’s US-Africa Summit. The summit organizers dedicated a physical “Prosper Africa Deal Room” for American and African business tycoons, investors, and government officials to meet, discuss, and announce future business agreements. The goal of the Deal Room is to “advance mutually beneficial partnerships that create jobs and drive inclusive and sustainable growth on both sides of the Atlantic,” according to the description of the summit organizers. Yet, the real purpose of such a room, which has been live-streamed by top media outlets all day, is perhaps to show off, in real-time, the progress of US-Africa relations with America’s superpower competitors, especially China.

The Economic Question

In the African domain, the United States is entering a new level of competition with several international and regional actors that already have sturdier economic and security partnerships in the fertile continent. On the top of this competitors’ list are China, Russia, Turkey, and two of the wealthiest countries in the Arab Gulf region, namely Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Their collective power as pragmatic allies outweighs the power of the United States and Europe.

In the past few years, the UAE, as one example, emerged as a primary logistics hub for China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the Middle East and North Africa region and a host of more than six-thousand Chinese companies. In addition, China, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have been running joint and parallel infrastructure and tourism projects in east Africa. 

Last week, the first-ever Arab-China Summit was held in Riyadh. The Chinese President, Xi Jinping, and a dozen of Arab leaders returned home after the summit with several economic and security agreements that some of them described as a milestone for “high-quality” cooperation. 

Unlike the United States, eastern superpowers do not tie security and economic cooperation with Arabs to improving human rights and governance conditions, which most Arab countries view as interference in domestic affairs. Likewise, most African countries, including those who yearn to establish solid alliances with the United States, find working with China much easier because it does not load agreements with political change provisions. 

The fierce economic standoff between the west and Russia since the latter’s invasion of Ukraine in the Spring is believed to be one of the key motivators behind convening the US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington this week. After losing several of its best Arab allies to Russia and China, mainly because of inconsistent foreign policy moves in the past two years, the Biden Administration is keen on winning over Africa to compensate for this massive loss. 

That raises the question about what the U.S. Administration can realistically offer to Africa to win this competition, especially in the lack of a collective African perception of what Africa needs from Washington that the other powerful competitors have not already introduced.

The United States has been the second top investor in Africa, after China, over the past decade (2010-2019), according to data from the “Swiss-African Business Relations Status Quo 2021” report. The distance between China and the United States' positions on the index compared to other countries on the top ten list, such as France, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, is as wide as eleven-thousand newly created jobs. Yet, the gap between China as the top investor and the United States in the second position is as large as six-thousand newly created jobs. China poured in Africa at least 27% of its foreign investments in that period.

On the regional level, the report shows that the UAE is the only Arab country that made it to the top ten investors in Africa in the past ten years. UAE holds the 9th position on the index with 2,968 newly created jobs. That puts UAE above wealthy western investors like Switzerland, Spain, and Canada. The UAE is determined to continue expanding its investments in Africa, especially in the countries of eastern and southern Africa, in the coming decades. According to a white paper issued in October 2021 by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and commissioned by Dubai Chamber, the UAE held 88% (US$1.2 billion) of total investments by all Arab Gulf countries in Sub-Sahara Africa in the period between January 2016 and July 2021.

It's Turkey, Not China! 

Turkey is another remarkable competitor that the United States should watch out for its growing influence on Africa. Turkey is the fourth largest investor in Africa, after China, the United States, and France. The difference between Turkey’s investment power in Sub-Sahara African countries, compared to the power of European investors, such as France and Germany, is slightly a few hundred newly created jobs over the past ten years. 

In 2020, the total trade volume between Turkey and Africa reached as high as US$25.3 billion, compared to a trading volume of US$20 billion between Africa and the entire continent of Europe. Most African imports from Turkey are textiles, furniture, electronics, steel, and cement. Meanwhile, Turkey made a direct investment of US$6.5 billion in the construction sector in Africa over that period.

Nevertheless, Turkey’s political influence on Africa is much thicker than any other competitor, even China’s. That is basically due to the clever employment of the military diplomacy tool by the leadership of the Turkish Armed Forces to win over allies in a continent boiling above a myriad of security threats, ranging from terrorism, border conflicts, and civil wars. This week, while the United States is hosting a summit for Africa, African military leaders have visited the Turkish Minister of National Defense, Hulusi Akar, in Ankara to discuss cooperation and review military deals.

Turkey’s military diplomacy pattern is designed to create a double-layered bond of economic and security co-dependency with targeted countries that can hardly be broken once tied. This pattern was successfully applied in the long-term partnerships that Turkey established with pivotal countries in Asia, such as Pakistan and Azerbaijan, in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Turkey’s indigenous defense industry is about to hit a self-sufficiency rate of 80% by the end of 2022. The starving market of arms and ammunition in Africa is one of the ideal destinations for Turkish military products. Today, Turkey is already exporting weapons to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya, and the list is expanding by the day. The African countries are particularly interested in the Turkish drones and helicopters, as well as technologically advanced electronic war systems that they can procure from Turkey for a relatively lower cost than the price of similar equipment from the United States, Russia, or even China. 

The Flaw in Western Perception

In general, western powers are usually unlucky when it comes to competing against the eastern superpowers, or even regional actors, in the African continent. Europe’s vain quest to revive ties with Africa is an example that the United States should study and learn from. At least since 2020, Europe has been trying to redefine its relationship with Africa as a strategic partnership rather than a “donor-recipient” affair. The highlight of this effort was creating a new EU-Africa Strategy that encompasses a huge budget of thirty billion Euros for social development projects in North Africa.

In early 2021, the European Council approved a proposal by the European Commission to establish the “New Agenda for The Mediterranean” to “relaunch and strengthen the strategic partnership between the European Union and its southern neighborhood partners.” Consequently, a new instrument titled “Neighborhood, Development and International Cooperation Instrument - (NDICI)” was issued to guide Europe’s policy in the Mediterranean. The NDICI set an investment recovery plan in targeted African countries with a budget of seven billion Euros for the period 2021-2027, with a promise to mobilize up to thirty billion Euros in private and public investments over the next ten years.

Europe’s urgent interest in regaining its long-lost influence in Africa is not new. Leading voices of major European collegiate bodies have been calling to strengthen the bond with Africa, for years. However, the wide gap between Europe’s vision and Africa’s needs has blocked positive measures and tangible results. That is the core of the lesson that the United States needs to derive from the European failed endeavors in Africa. Despite its proven sincerity to renew and foster ties with Africa, the U.S. Administration may fail if it does not abandon its western perception of politics and business conduct for a while and try to look at Africa with African eyes.

Human Rights in the New World Order

This year, the world is observing Human Rights Day amidst a global mess of security and economic crises. That makes us wonder about the future of the international movement for defending and supporting human rights, and whether it will be able to survive this huge amount of political and economic uncertainties that have been overwhelming the world stage since 2020.    

Europe, where the concept of human rights started millennia ago, is struggling to secure hydrocarbon resources to warm homes this winter. Most of the countries in Africa and the Middle East are suffering from grinding economic crises that are putting a large number of them on the verge of famine. On a wider scale, the entire globe is facing serious security threats, ranging from Russian threats of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine to the unsettling conflicts in Syria and Libya, and the rise of Islamic extremists and terrorist organizations in Afghanistan and its surroundings.

The global standoff between western and eastern powers around the war in Eastern Europe is escalating by the day. Russia and China are taking strides in mobilizing Arab and African countries to their side, while the United States is losing its best allies in the Middle East. Sooner or later, this is going to change the balance of power in our modern-day world. 

If the eastern camp wins, which is highly likely given the unexplained confusing policies of the U.S. Administration of President Biden, human rights as a set of universal values are going to suffer. The leaders of the eastern powers, who mostly adopt negative views towards human rights as we know them today, may implicitly try to push the conversation around defending human rights to the back burner. Even worse, they may take measures to avert the gains achieved by the international human rights movement, especially on the set of rights related to individual freedoms. 

In a recent meeting with his national organization for human rights, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, publicly attacked human rights doctrine and labeled it as a weapon the West used to mentally occupy the world. “The doctrine of international human rights is being used to justify Western ideological hegemony;” Putin stressed after blaming the international human rights organizations, which he describes as controlled by the west, for “not condemning Ukraine for bombing residential neighborhoods on the territory of Donbas.” 

Ironically, Donbas is originally a Ukrainian territory that was occupied by Russia. It is also appalling to see Putin who invaded Ukraine, in February, leading to horrible consequences inside Ukraine and worldwide, using the “human rights” terminology to blame Ukraine for defending itself against his invading troops.

In China, another leading power from the east, the human rights notion is no less hated than it is in Russia and other autocratic countries. In October, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, whose state has been overseeing the ethnic cleansing of Uyghur Muslims for years, told the media that China has its own understanding of human rights that is different from the western concept. Quoting Karl Marx, the philosophical godfather of the communist movement, Xi said that his country adopts Marx’s perception that "right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.” 

The COVID-19 pandemic offers a context that enhances this autocratic approach to human rights. Under the pandemic, the countries that had centralized – and even repressive – systems of governance were more successful in controlling the pandemic and its economic consequences than the free countries. Also, during this period, governments worldwide heavily suppressed individual freedoms to protect the collective. This strongly resonated with the eastern cultural perception of prioritizing the community over the individual, in comparison to the western culture which glorifies individual freedoms above all else. 

In her statement on the COVID-19 pandemic informal briefing to the UN Human Rights Council, Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, adopted a balanced, but rare, vision of how the UN and similar bodies should handle the pandemic crisis. She noted that “the pandemic is exposing the damaging impact of inequalities, in every society. In developed countries, fault lines in access to health care; in labor rights and social protections; in living space; and in dignity are suddenly very visible.” Then she emphasized the respect for civil and political rights during this crisis, as “difficult decisions are facing many governments. Emergency measures may well be needed to respond to this public health emergency. But an emergency situation is not a blank check to disregard human rights obligations.” 

This gloomy scene makes us worried about the future of human rights after the world recovers from the ongoing cluster of crises, regardless of who wins the west-east power competition. Will the people continue to believe in the importance of observing human rights values? Will governments continue to show commitment to protecting human rights? And, the most important question is about the future roles and credibility of international bodies, such as the United Nations, which are responsible for preserving and protecting human rights, worldwide.

Islamists in Egypt, Turkey State Ideology

Islamists of the Middle East, omnium-gatherum, are the group mostly offended by the recent handshake between the Egyptian and Turkish presidents in Doha last month. Meanwhile, some regional propagandists, who feel threatened by the potential of rapprochement between Turkey and Egypt, are trying to portray this handshake as a victory for political Islamists. Remaining in this vicious cycle for too long is not productive and may get the wheel of reconciliation stuck, once again. 

The Muslim Brotherhood group has been one of the main factors that broke the rift between Qatar and Turkey on one side and Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Bahrain on the other side, following the Arab Spring revolutions. A decade ago, the Turkish state chose to support the then-populous political Islamist organization at the expense of having normal and stable relationships with the new Egyptian state and the Arab Gulf monarchies that took on themselves the mission to eliminate the Muslim Brotherhood from the region.

However, time and experience have proven to the Turkish leadership that they made the wrong bet, especially as the Muslim Brotherhood group smashed on the edge of internal divisions among the leaders and between the leadership and the bases.

At least, since November 2020, Turkish President Erdogan and his senior officials have been exceptionally active in correcting the course of Turkey’s foreign policy in the region. Over the past two years, Turkey successfully restored its relationship with Arab Gulf countries, including the UAE which had a fatal rivalry with Turkey in Libya. In parallel, Egypt’s relationship with Qatar has been progressing to unprecedented levels of understanding and coordination. This set the stage for the long-awaited reconciliation between the Turkish and Egyptian states.  

The historic handshake between President Erdogan and his Egyptian counterpart, El-Sisi, has not magically resolved the conflicting perceptions of both countries towards the political Islamists, in general, and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Yet, it showed evidence that both leaders are willing to ease their strong stances on this sensitive issue.

The issue of the Muslim Brotherhood is not as big and multifaceted as the issue of Libya or the conflicts over maritime zones in the Mediterranean, which Turkey and Egypt stand on opposite sides regarding them. Yet, the Muslim Brotherhood issue is somehow tied to the political ideologies that each of the two states embraces. 

In other words, President Erdogan’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood was initially motivated by his belief, as a successful Islamist politician himself, that the Egyptian Islamist organization was a copy of his own Justice and Development Party (AKP). Retreating from supporting the group, later, is making the Turkish president appear like he is abandoning the Islamist ideology as a whole, contrary to the truth. 

On the flip side, President El-Sisi’s fight against the Muslim Brotherhood was mainly motivated by his military ideology which encompasses the political ideology of prioritizing and protecting the nation-state at all other expenses. Approaching the Turkish and Qatari leadership in a friendly way, given their history of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, makes president El-Sisi appear like he is abandoning the military-dictated nation-state ideology altogether, contrary to the truth. 

Perceptions are everything in this game. Backstage, the Egyptian and Turkish presidents have been dealing with a strong backlash from their supporting citizens and parties. The Islamist sympathizers who represent the majority of Erdogan’s constituency in Turkey are angry at him for shaking hands with El-Sisi. Likewise, the Coptic Christians and women who represent the majority of El-Sisi’s electoral constituency are frowning at El-Sisi’s smiles and friendliness with Erdogan.

In that sense, for the reconciliation between Egypt and Turkey to succeed, the leaders in both countries need to re-adjust the public perception to accept the change. They need to draw a clear line between what each of the two states perceives as a strategy and what it embraces as part of its political ideology. That is particularly true when it comes to discussing the future positions of each of the two leaders regarding the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Egypt-Turkey Next Handshake

At the opening ceremony of the FIFA World Cup in Doha, Qatar’s Prince Tamim Bin Hamad scored one of his finest political goals by overseeing a historic handshake between the leaders of Turkey and Egypt. The friendly encounter between the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Doha earlier this month, cannot be seen as a standard act of courtesy that happened out of sheer coincidence. It was the climax of a year of backstage arrangements in both countries and months of Qatar-led shuttle diplomacy.

The importance of momentous meeting between the leaders of Turkey and Egypt, which lasted for 45 minutes, does not stop at the threshold of melting away the personal prejudices that incited nine years of heated diplomatic tensions and state-sponsored media wars. This encounter marks a turning point in the bilateral ties between the two states. Yet, most important is its impact on the geopolitical and geo-economic future of the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. On another level, it reframes Qatar in a whole new positive light as an active peacemaker and agenda-setter in the Arab Gulf region and beyond.

Zoom Out

Since its successful reconciliation with Egypt in 2021, the Qatari leadership has been determined to fix the rift between Egypt and Turkey. This coincided with a sincere desire by the Turkish state to end conflicts with Arab and non-Arab neighbors in the Middle East. Over the past year, Turkey restored its broken ties with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and even Israel. Meanwhile, Egypt and Qatar successfully rebuilt their bond of trust as sisterly countries by fostering economic and diplomatic cooperation.    

The conflict between Egypt and Turkey was not as whacking as the conflict between Turkey and Gulf states or as was the conflict between Egypt and Qatar. Despite that, the reconciliation process between Egypt and Turkey, which started in May 2021 with limited diplomatic talks in Cairo and Ankara, has been progressing at a snail pace. That is mainly because the heads of the two states have been avoiding each other out of fear of the reaction of the public citizens in their respective countries, who have been fueled by the rhetoric of hate and anger for years. The recent meeting between El-Sisi and Erdogan is believed to accelerate the process of diplomatic rebounding in the near future. 

Mending the broken ties between Egypt and Turkey is the last missing piece of the puzzle for forming ‘the coalition of odds’ that is believed to lead the future of the Middle East for decades to come. The term ‘coalition of odds’ was coined by the writer of this analysis, in 2020, to refer to the new alliance of regional powers that has been forming under the pressure of international crises and regional challenges over the past few years. 

This new alliance is mainly a quartet coalition of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt. Each pair of these four countries stand at opposite spots on the spectrum of national strategic goals. However, each of them represents a crucial cornerstone of geopolitics, geo-economics, and military supremacy that when integrated will comprise a mosaic of power that has never been seen before in the greater region of the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. 

Together, this quartet of odds can contain Iran and mitigate the threats constantly raised by its militia. They can dominate the flow of world trade movement across the Red Sea and the Mediterranean thanks to their unique geographic locations and economic outreach in Asia, Europe, and Africa. Also, needless to mention their collective dominance over the majority of the world’s energy resources, including fossil fuel, hydrocarbon extraction, and green energy resources. And above all, they can form an unbeatable regional military coalition enhanced by the NATO experience that Turkey enjoys and the massive personnel and armament capabilities of Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

Zoom In

Economic cooperation could be an ideal starting point for accelerating the process of rebuilding Turkish-Egyptian relations. In complete contrast to the diplomatic impasse that kept Egypt and Turkey apart for almost a decade, commercial trading between them has been steadily growing. This year marked an unprecedented increase of 32.6% in the volume of trade between the two countries, compared to last year, according to the estimates of the Egyptian Chamber of Commerce. 

According to the latest statistics by the Egyptian government, during the first quarter of 2022, Egyptian exports to Turkey grew by 178.9% (960.6 million dollars) from 537.1 million dollars at the beginning of 2021 to 1.4 billion dollars at the beginning of this year. In comparison, the volume of Turkey’s exports to Egypt increased from 3.31 billion dollars in 2020 to 3.94 billion dollars in the first quarter of 2022. Over the past 25 years, Egypt’s exports to Turkey have been steadily increasing by 9.63% each year, compared to a 10.2% annual increase in Turkey’s exports to Egypt.

Since the last quarter of 2021, Turkey has begun to receive, for the first time, cargos of liquified natural gas (LNG) from Egypt’s Idku and Damietta offshore plants in the eastern Mediterranean. The geographic proximity between the two countries made the transfer of liquified gas a breath in terms of speed and shipping costs. That should encourage the two countries to consider colliding forces to combat the ongoing global energy crisis. 

Turkey is situated at the southern gates of Europe and close to the North African countries that produce massive amounts of oil and gas, such as Libya and Algeria. Also, Turkey represents the adjoining entry point for the liquified natural gas coming from Egypt and Israel through Egypt's natural gas liquefaction plants to be exported to Europe. If the two countries agree to work together in that regard, they will not only solve the global energy crises but will dramatically lift up their struggling economies.

However, for this to happen, Turkey and Egypt need to clear the air about their conflicting economic and defense policies in the Eastern Mediterranean. Obviously, Egypt will not be able to back down from its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) agreement signed with Greece in 2020. Yet, this should not prevent Egypt from convening similar agreements with Turkey. Meanwhile, the time has come to give Turkey access to the East Med Organization, given the fact that it is the country with the longest border in the Eastern Mediterranean, regardless of its non-ending conflicts with Greece. 

Logically speaking, it is in Egypt's best interest not to involve in the century-long conflict between Turkey and Greece or side with one party against the other. Needless to mention, Egypt is set to harvest more lucrative benefits from a maritime agreement with Turkey than it can have from agreements with other countries on the northern side of the Mediterranean.

Consequently, that brings up the issue of Turkey’s and Egypt’s involvement at opposite fronts in the conflict in Libya. In addition to diplomatic talks, Egyptian and Turkish military leaders need to sit together to address the Libyan conflict, which each of them sees as integral to their national security. The Egyptian state is still concerned about the continued existence of Turkish troops on Libyan soil. 

Turkey still supports the Tripoli-based government against the parliament, and Khalifa Haftar’s forces in the eastern territories, which Egypt is a staunch supporter of. Egypt considers this a threat to its national security, despite the insistence of the Turkish state that the troops in Tripoli are only there to preserve the balance of power and prevent the eastern militia from taking over the government.

The Next Handshake 

In a televised interview last week, Turkey’s President Erdogan highlighted that his meeting with the Egyptian president was fruitful and left them “very happy.” But this is not enough. Despite its significant symbolism, the meeting between El-Sisi and Erdogan is merely the beginning of a series of serious negotiations that need to happen between the Egyptian and the Turkish states. The next handshake should not be limited to the diplomatic channels, especially given their record of failing to achieve real progress in that file for an entire year. Direct communications between the two presidents, consultations between the intelligence bureaus of both countries, and above all military-to-military talks could be way more effective in realizing successful reconciliation between Turkey and Egypt that is set to last for a long time on a solid ground of realistic visions.