Turkey and Egypt appoint ambassadors to restore diplomatic ties

July 4: Turkey and Egypt have appointed ambassadors to restore their relations at the highest diplomatic level.

In a joint statement released by the Turkish foreign ministry on Tuesday, the two governments said Turkey nominated Salih Mutlu Sen as its ambassador to Cairo and Egypt appointed Amr Elhamamy as its envoy to Ankara.

“This step aims at the renormalisation of relations between the two countries and reflects the mutual will to improve bilateral relations in the interests of the Turkish and Egyptian peoples,” the statement said.

Relations between Cairo and Ankara were severed in 2013 after then-military commander and current Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi led a coup to remove President Mohamed Morsi, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader, a political Islamist group active in multiple countries.

Mensur Akgun, a professor of international relations at Istanbul’s Kultur University, said ties between two key regional players have been exceedingly poor since the 2013 coup in particular because of Ankara’s unbending stance against the government of el-Sisi, who became president in 2014.

“The political dialogue between the two sides was frozen until a few years ago, and the re-establishment of relations at the ambassadorial level today shows that the sides are ready to talk in the political sphere again,” he said.

“I believe both countries understood that it is not possible to change the other and get a perfect addressee on the other side of the table,” Akgun said, adding: “They also should have come to an understanding to protect the optimum interests of both sides in the region.”

(Al Jazeera)