Nato apologised to Turkey on Friday after Ankara pulled its troops from a military exercise in Norway to protest incidents deemed insulting to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the country's modern founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The alliance's Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, himself Norwegian, moved quickly to say sorry after an angry intervention by Erdogan on an episode that risked creating further strife between Turkey and its allies.
The incidents took place during Nato's "Trident Javelin" exercise in the southern Norwegian city of Stavanger aimed at increasing coordination between the allies at headquarters level, which wound up Friday. Erdogan said that Ankara had withdrawn its 40 troops from the exercise in protest, adding: "It's not possible to have this kind of alliance."
Norway's Defence Minister Frank Bakke-Jensen, speaking to AFP, also expressed "regret" over the incident. Nato gave no details on the nature of the incident, saying only that "offence had been caused". But Turkey's state-run Anadolu news agency said that an image of Ataturk had been used to portray an enemy protagonist in a scenario.
In a second incident a chat account was opened under Erdogan's name during a virtual scenario as a collaborator with a "leader of an enemy state". Without going into detail, Erdogan said an image of Ataturk and his own name were used "and these were the targets". He said Turkey's top general Hulusi Akar and EU Affairs Minister Omer Celik - who were on their way to a Nato conference in Halifax, Canada - had informed him of the incident.
"They said 'this has happened... and we are going to take out our 40 soldiers'," Erdogan said while speaking in front of giant pictures of himself and Ataturk. "And I said 'Absolutely, don't hesitate, take them out right now'." Ataturk founded modern Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 and is widely credited with salvaging a functioning Turkish state in the 1919-1923 War of Independence.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.