Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he is ready to deploy soldiers to Libya following the announcement of a security agreement with the Libyan government. Ankara has been actively seeking to project its influence across the Mediterranean as a scramble intensifies for the region’s energy resources, VOA news reports.
“If Libya were to make a request, we would send a sufficient number of troops,” Erdogan said Tuesday in an address to university students in Ankara. “After the signing of the security agreement, there is no hurdle.”
In what many analysts see as a surprise move, Ankara earlier this month reached two agreements with Libya’s Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA).
“It’s only natural if the Libya government invited Turkey to provide assistance to deploy Turkish forces in accordance with this agreement. It’s entirely normal,” said former Turkish ambassador Mithat Rende. “Because there are so many countries that already are part of the game. This General Haftar is heavily supported by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, France, and I also understand, the Russian Federation.”
Khalifa Haftar, the de facto leader of eastern Libya, is currently battling GNA forces for control of Libya. Ankara’s commitment to the Libya Tripoli-based government could put it on a collision course with Moscow. Erdogan suggested Tuesday that any Libya request for military support could be in response to the presence of “Russian Wagner mercenaries.”
The Wagner Group is a private security force run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman reported to have close ties to the Kremlin.
“I wish that the matter of Haftar would not create a new Syria in our relations with Russia,” Erdogan said Monday in a television interview. Ankara and Moscow back rival sides in the Syrian civil war. The Turkish president said he plans to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Libya by phone next week.
Despite backing rival sides in the Syrian conflict, Putin and Erdogan have built up a good working relationship. Bilateral ties are deepening in the fields of energy and trade, which even extends to Ankara purchasing Russian military hardware — to the alarm of Turkey’s traditional western allies.
Alarm in Greece
Moscow is not the only country, however, that likely is concerned by Ankara’s deepening relationship with Libya. Athens is voicing alarm over Ankara’s Libya agreement to declare an exclusive maritime zone between the two countries.
Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos slammed the agreement Tuesday, claiming it compromised Greece’s territorial waters. “Turkey’s thoughts are on how it imagines it’s imperialist fantasies,” said Pavlopoulos.
Athens and Ankara have engaged in increasingly bitter maritime territorial disputes across the Mediterranean, fueled by recent discoveries of vast natural gas reserves. “The strategy is that Turkey should protect its legitimate rights in the Mediterranean,” said Rende, who is now an energy expert.
“We [Greece and Turkey] have overlapping claims, overlapping declarations of maritime zones, and Turkey is left alone in the Mediterranean. Other countries — Greece, Israel Egypt — have formed gas partnerships forums and so on and Turkey was isolated. So it’s only natural that Turkey concludes agreements to protect its rights in the Mediterranean.”
Adding to Athens’ unease is that Mediterranean waters claimed by Ankara under its Libyan agreement is the only viable route for a planned gas pipeline to distribute recently discovered Israeli and Cypriot gas through Greece to Europe.
“Greek Cypriots, Egypt, Greece, and Israel cannot establish a natural gas transmission line without Turkey’s consent,” Erdogan said Monday.
Ankara’s Libya deal is seen as part of a more assertive regional policy. “It’s part and parcel of a new doctrine,” said former senior Turkish diplomat and now regional analyst Aydin Selcen.
“The first move was challenging the Greek Cypriot over energy searches, in the disputed exclusives economic zones of Cyprus. Then this move with Libya is the second one. It’s extremely important and significant,” said Selcen.
EU sanctions
Ankara is currently deploying research ships searching for hydrocarbons in the disputed waters of the Greek Cypriot government.
“Greece will defend its borders, it’s territory,” said Pavlopoulos, “which are also the European Union’s border … with the help of the international community and the EU.”
The EU is already considering sanctions against Ankara for violating Greek Cypriot territorial waters. “They [the EU] should remain neutral,” said Rende. “If they don’t, Turkey is prepared to face the consequences because what is at stake are Turkey’s national interests, and we don’t give up our national interests.”
Rende insists Ankara is ready to negotiate with Athens. Turkey argues that an agreement with Athens and the Greek Cypriots would pave the way for Turkish territory to provide a route for distributing recently discovered gas reserves.
“The most natural market for this prospective gas is Turkey,” said political scientist Cengiz Aktar of Athens University. “It not just to sell through Turkey. But Turkey is the most reasonable and feasible market to absorb this gas.”
Analysts suggest Ankara’s robust regional foreign policy is part of a broader strategy to remake Turkey as a regional energy hub. Procuring recently discovered Mediterranean gas ultimately could provide Ankara significant leverage with Moscow and Tehran. In the next two years, major Iranian and Russian gas supply agreements to Turkey are due for renewal.
“Turkey’s main strategy is to diversify its energy resource imports and their routes, to enable flexibility of supply,” said Rende.
The number of journalists imprisoned globally remains near a record high, according to an annual survey released Wednesday by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which identifies China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt as the world’s largest jailers of reporters, VOA news reports.
“For the fourth consecutive year, hundreds of journalists are imprisoned globally as authoritarians like Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Mohammad bin Salman, and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi show no signs of letting up on the critical media,” says CPJ’s 2019 Prison Census.
Although the number of journalists imprisoned worldwide slipped from 253 to 245 in 2019, the New York-based press freedom watchdog also says that journalists charged with reporting “false” or “fake news” continues to climb.
“The number charged with ‘false news’ rose to 30, compared with 28 last year,” says the report, explaining that the charge, most prolifically levied in Egypt, “has climbed steeply since 2012, when CPJ found only one journalist worldwide facing the allegation.”
“In the past year, repressive countries, including Russia and Singapore, have enacted laws criminalizing the publication of ‘fake news.’”
This year’s census marks the first time since 2015 that Turkey did not rank as the world’s largest jailer, in part because Ankara, “having stamped out virtually all independent reporting, released journalists awaiting trial or appeal.”
China — second only to Turkey as one of the world’s most repressive media environments for years — has 47 journalists in prison, the same number as it did in 2018, which largely resulted from reporters attempting to document large-scale persecution of the predominantly Muslim Uighur ethnic minority in Xinjiang.
“In one recent Chinese case, Sophia Huang Xueqin, a freelancer who formerly worked as an investigative reporter at Chinese outlets, was arrested in October shortly after describing on her blog what it was like to march with the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong,” the report states.
Saudi Arabia, “where the number of journalists jailed has risen steadily since 2011,” the report states, is currently holding 26 reporters behind bars amid allegations of torture.
The growing number of arrests and documented abuse, say CPJ researchers, reflect a brutal crackdown on dissent under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom U.S. and UN officials blame for the October 2018 murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Istanbul.
The crown prince told CBS News’s “60 Minutes” in September accepted responsibility for Kashoggi’s murder, but denied that it was done on his order.
Most of the 26 reporters currently imprisoned in Egypt, CPJ reports, are prosecuted en masse, brought before a judge in groups, typically to face charges of terrorism and “fake news” reports.
Egyptian government officials, much like their counterparts in Turkey, China, Russian, and Iran, typically insist they target only reporters who aim to destabilize their respective countries.
CPJ’s 2019 census also says Iran saw an uptick of journalist incarcerations in 2019, as did Russia, which now has seven reporters in state custody.
“Of 38 journalists jailed in sub-Saharan Africa, the bulk remain in Eritrea, where most have not been heard from for nearly two decades,” the report says, adding that Cameroon has the second worst record of African nations, while evidence of free-speech safeguards are backsliding in Ethiopia and Nigeria.
Three journalists are jailed in the Americas, with incarcerations in Venezuela, Honduras, and Cuba.
“The highest number of journalists imprisoned in any year since CPJ began keeping track is 273 in 2016,” the report states. “After China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the worst jailers are Eritrea, Vietnam, and Iran.”
CPJ’s annual census does not account for disappeared journalists or those held by non-state actors. The survey accounts only for journalists in government custody as of 12:01 a.m. on Dec. 1, 2019.