Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus declared that Turkey would like to restore ties with Egypt – relations ruptured three years ago after the military ousted elected Islamist president Mohamad Mursi, who was a close ally of Turkey’s ruling AKP government, but no steps have been taken to normalise relations.

As reported by Al Arabiya online, Turkey last month announced the restoration of diplomatic ties with Israel after a six-year rupture and expressed regret to Russia over the downing of a warplane, seeking to mend its strained alliances.

“The context with Egypt is different from the approaches undertaken with Russia and Israel,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told journalists in comments cited by Dogan news agency.

Erdogan said that a thaw with Egypt’s “oppressive regime” should not be expected any time soon. He stressed, however, that Turkey’s dispute was with Egypt’s government, not its people, and repeated his condemnation of the crackdown on Mursi’s Muslim Brotherhood.

In a separate report, the Turkish Weekly quoted Kurtulmus as telling reported on July 11 that it is “out of the question” for Turkey to be an enemy of the people of Egypt. “The peoples of Turkey and Egypt are brothers,” he said, adding that the “the governments of the Republic of Turkey have suspended ties with Egypt because they are against military coups”.

“We of course want to normalise our relations with Egypt but it’s perhaps a must for the [military] coup regime that shelved democracy and chucked it out to examine its actions,” he said.

Source: www.neweurope.eu