Erdogan refuses to speak to Egypt's ElBaradei

AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE

Thursday 18 July 2013

ISTANBUL: Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has refused to speak to Egypt’s new Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei, the latest broadside in a spat that erupted after the military coup in the Arab world’s most populous country.

Erdogan infuriated Egypt’s interim leaders after he voiced support for ousted Islamist president Muhammad Mursi.

“How could I speak to you? You were not elected, you were appointed by the orchestrators of a coup,” he said on Wednesday, addressing ElBaradei in remarks carried on CNN-Turk’s website.

ElBaradei, a prominent liberal and former head of the UN nuclear watchdog, was sworn in on Sunday as part of a new cabinet appointed after the July 3 military overthrow of Mursi.

Erdogan, leader of the Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP), had branded the coup as an “enemy of democracy” and said Mursi was the only legitimate president of Egypt.

He said he had received a letter from ElBaradei seeking a telephone conversation after his comments.

“They don’t like what we are saying; they are uncomfortable with it,” Erdogan said. “They said certain comments were made without full knowledge of the facts.”

The interim government in Cairo on Tuesday voiced “strong resentment” at Erdogan’s comments about the overthrow of Mursi, Egypt’s first freely elected president.

Relations between Turkey and Egypt had strengthened during Mursi’s year in power.

Source: Arab News.
Link: http://www.arabnews.com/news/458385.

Muslim Brotherhood Continues Protests

17 July 2013

Supporters of deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi are continuing their mass protests against the political transition underway in Egypt, following the formation of a new interim cabinet that has no members from Islamist parties.

Street demonstrations continued Wednesday outside Cairo's main government buildings, demanding that Morsi be returned to power.

European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton is visiting the Egyptian capital, and became the latest international figure to meet with interim Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi and interim President Adly Mansour.

Unlike U.S. envoy William Burns earlier in the week, Ashton also is expected to meet senior figures in Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamist group insists the ousted president be reinstated and has refused to take part in any interim government.

The newly sworn in cabinet led by Beblawi is composed mainly of liberals and technocrats. It has seven holdovers from the previous administration, including the army chief Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who ousted Morsi, and serves as defense minister and deputy prime minister.

Three female ministers were appointed, filling the health, information and environment portfolios.

Morsi's removal has bitterly divided Egypt, with thousands of his supporters maintaining a vigil in a Cairo square to demand his return, swelling to tens of thousands for mass demonstrations every few days.

Clashes overnight Monday into early Tuesday between security forces and supporters of Morsi left seven people dead and more than 260 injured. Authorities arrested more than 400 mostly pro-Morsi supporters following the fighting.

Source: allAfrica.
Link: http://allafrica.com/stories/201307171685.html.

Turkish PM speaks out against usurious credit cards

17 July 2013

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called on people not to use credit cards extensively as he says the banking sector maximizes its profits extensively through the credit card system at people's expense.

Speaking at an iftar (fast-breaking) dinner that was held for martyrs' families in Ankara, Erdogan slammed many bank owners for making huge fortunes through exploiting the credit card system.

"I call on people not to use credit cards. My people have enormous debt to banks. A single bank -- I will not name it here -- takes in TL 600,000,000 per year through credit card use," Erdogan said in his vehement criticism of the way the financial system operates in Turkey.

He says if people cautiously spent money in accordance with their income, there would be no need to use credit cards, which only bring massive debts to poor people.

Erdogan and members of his government have accused speculators and a "high-interest-rate lobby" of stoking volatility in financial markets to make a quick profit at the expense of the Turkish economy.

With the prime minister also keen to maintain strong economic growth ahead of elections next year, the central bank has been reluctant to hike rates following a credit-fueled boom.

But the country's assets have been hit along with other emerging markets since the U.S. Federal Reserve suggested in May it would begin scaling back its stimulus program, while weeks of often violent anti-government demonstrations last month damaged Turkey's reputation for stability added to the pressure.

Governor Erdem Basci signaled on Monday the central bank may raise rates next week to stem a slide in the Turkish currency, which has sunk to record lows against the dollar in recent weeks.

That would make the lira and lira-denominated assets such as Turkish government bonds more attractive to foreign investors, as well as pushing up commercial banks' lending rates.

Erdogan, who repeatedly said last year he wanted real interest rates of zero percent, vowed last month to "choke" speculators growing rich off "the sweat of the people", urging Turks to put their money in state not private banks.

"I didn't say "interest rate lobby" recently for nothing. I say these things because I know something," Erdogan said.

Source: Agencies

Kavkaz Center

Source: Kavkaz Center.
Link: http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2013/07/17/18069.shtml.

Top pro-Assad official eliminated in southern Lebanon

17 July 2013

A prominent Syrian pro-Assad figure was eliminated outside his home in southern Lebanon early on Wednesday, regime-run media in Damascus reported.

Mohammed Darrar Jammo, a political analyst who often appeared on Arab TV stations, was gunned down outside his home in the coastal town of Sarafand by gunmen, the SANA news agency reported.

The town is in predominantly Shiite southern Lebanon where Assad enjoys wide support.

SANA blamed an "armed terrorist group" for the killing which took place at around 2 a.m.

Jammo was head of the political and international relations division of the International Organization for Arab Immigrants.

He was one of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad's strongest defenders, according to The Associated Press.

Source: Agencies

Kavkaz Center

Source: Kavkaz Center.
Link: http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2013/07/17/18070.shtml.

Secularists and the military putschists blocked 300 believers in Egypt's Fatiha mosque

16 July 2013

Egyptian military putschists and the members of the secular group "Lumberjacks" besieged Cairo's Fatiha mosque on the Ramses Square, blocking in it about 300 supporters of Mursi.

Osama Abu al-Hasan, one of those who is in the mosque, told Turkish news agency Anadolu on the phone, that it was already two hours passed since they were still kept inside the mosque, and secularists threatened them with firearms.

"At this point, about 300 believers are locked in the mosque. Most of them - children, women and elderly people", said Abu al-Hasan, calling on people to help them.

Meanwhile, according to the latest information, during last night in clashes in Cairo, 7 people were killed and over 260 injured.

Millions of people joined the protests against the coup in 22 cities across the country. The protests degenerated into clashes with the secularists and the army.

Another clash took place in Cairo. The participants were members of the secularist group "Lumberjack" and the military putschists. Street battles were going on in the squares of Giza and Ramses.

As one of the leaders of the movement Muslim Brotherhood Mohamed Beltagy said, that the anarchist group Black Block, earlier declared to be a terrorist organization, took the side of the secularists in the street battles.

In Alexandria, the second largest city in Egypt, demonstration against the military coup took place in front of the US Consulate.

Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center

Source: Kavkaz Center.
Link: http://kavkazcenter.com/eng/content/2013/07/16/18064.shtml.

Muslims Start Ramadan Fast Amid Turmoil

Wed, Jul 10, 2013

BEIRUT (AP) - Many devout Muslims in the Middle East have started observing the dawn-to-dusk fast for the month of Ramadan even as the region is rocked by Egypt's turmoil and the relentless civil war in Syria.

For most Sunnis and Shiites, Ramadan started on Wednesday while others are expected to begin observing the holy month on Thursday - differences based on various sightings of the new moon.

Nowhere is the hardship for this Ramadan starker than in Syria, where the civil war is now in its third year. The U.N. says at least 93,000 people have been killed since the conflict erupted.

Syria's fragile currency has reached an all-time low while food and fuel prices are soaring. The U.N. says over 4 million Syrians risk going hungry because they can't afford food.

Source: KoloTV.
Link: http://www.kolotv.com/home/headlines/Egypt-Ramadan-Begins-and-Military-Asks-for-Trust-214878791.html.

Bosnia reburies Srebrenica dead but lags behind in post-war Balkans

Thursday July 11, 2013

Maja Zuvela

POTOCARI, Bosnia (Reuters) - Bosnia reburied another 409 victims of the Srebrenica massacre on Thursday but, 18 years after Europe's worst atrocity since the Holocaust, the country remains mired in ethnic disputes long after other parties to the conflict have moved on.

Watched by thousands of mourners, coffins draped in green cloth were passed from hand to hand down lines of Bosnian Muslim men to be interred at the Potocari memorial center, a forest of white marble and wooden gravestones that now number 6,066.

Some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb forces in five summer days in 1995, towards the end of a war that erupted in 1992 with the collapse of federal Yugoslavia and would claim 100,000 lives.

Some bodies have yet to be found from what became Europe's worst mass killing since the Nazi Holocaust against Jews during World War Two.

Thursday's anniversary coincided with dramatic change in the Balkans. Bosnian neighbor and fellow former Yugoslav republic Croatia joined the European Union on July 1 and Serbia is on the cusp of accession talks following a landmark accord with Kosovo, its overwhelmingly ethnic Albanian former province.

Bosnia, however, trails the pack, still hostage to the ethnic politicking of rival Serb, Croat and Muslim (also known as Bosniak) leaders that has stifled development and kept it languishing on the margins of Europe.

Srebrenica remains an open wound, the cold facts still disputed by many Serbs.

"Innocent and helpless victims were faced with the cold and merciless hatred of criminals akin to those in the Nazi camps of Hitler's Germany," said Bakir Izetbegovic, the Muslim member of Bosnia's tripartite presidency.

"We have been asking ourselves through these 18 years - what could they have been guilty of, and to whom, in those hellish days?" said Izetbegovic, the son of Bosnia's wartime president.

SYRIA PARALLELS

Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic and his political chief, Radovan Karadzic, are standing trial in The Hague on charges including genocide in Srebrenica. Both deny that any orchestrated killing occurred.

Among those buried on Thursday were 44 boys, aged between 14 and 18, and a baby girl who died in a United Nations peacekeeping compound. Their remains were dug from nameless death pits and identified through DNA analysis.

"I feel like I'm losing them again today," said Ramiza Siljkovic, 62, kneeling by two freshly dug graves for the remains of her two sons. "Only a handful of their bones were recovered from two mass graves."

The Srebrenica massacre was the culmination of a policy of ethnic cleansing by Mladic's forces to carve a pure Serb state out of communally diverse Bosnia.

Many Serbs in Serbia and Bosnia still doubt the official figures and narrative of what happened in Srebrenica.

The town, located in wooded hill country of eastern Bosnia near the border with Serbia, was a designated "safe area" guarded by U.N. peacekeeping troops, but they abandoned their posts in the face of advancing Bosnian Serb forces.

The sectarian killings and big-power inertia of the current conflict in Syria has drawn comparisons with Bosnia.

The Bosnian war ended in a 1995 U.S.-brokered peace deal that created a byzantine system of ethnic quotas and power-sharing, frequently leading to abuse and paralysis.

The latest impasse is over how to issue the unique, 13-digit identification number given to every citizen, meaning that for weeks earlier this year babies were left unregistered and unable to leave the country even for emergency medical treatment.

The European Union, in a statement marking the anniversary, called for further progress towards reconciliation.

"Large steps have been made in that direction, but there is still much to be done, especially by those in positions of authority, so that citizens of the region can fully enjoy peace and prosperity, together with their fellow Europeans."

(Editing by Matt Robinson and Mark Heinrich)

Source: The Star.
Link: http://www.thestar.com.my/News/World/2013/07/11/Bosnia-reburies-Srebrenica-dead-but-lags-behind-in-postwar-Balkans.aspx.