ANKARA
Turkey's foreign minister has said not a single international or national actor believed that the Syrian president would preserve his position.
"Today, there are no international or national actors who believe Bashar al-Assad is to stay in Syria. Everybody started making plans for a new administration," Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Friday, responding to questions during a live TV broadcast.
"If we had stood by a regime that persecuted people in Syria, we would have felt obliged to go to Damascus again to establish ties with the new administration to be formed there and apologized to the Syrian nation," Davutoglu said.
The foreign minister noted that al-Assad had failed to succeed in reforms and walked on the edge of a cliff despite Turkey's warnings.
Pointing to the transformation processes in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, Davutoglu said regimes not supported by nations could not last long, and so would be the situation in Syria.
The minister also said that Turkey, since the beginning of the problem, had stood in the right place in terms of humanistic conscience, reading the flow of history accurately and strategic interests.
"Turkey is the main actor to determine Syria's future at the moment," the minister said, noting that other countries might see the Syrian question as a diplomatic matter, but what happened in Syria surely affected Turkey.
Davutoglu also said Turkey had learnt its lesson from what had happened in Iraq.
He said Turkey desired to see an elected president in Syria as soon as possible, as well as free political parties and free religious and ethnical groups.
"We hope to see a Syria that is integrated with the whole region and in peace with its own people," he said.
Davutoglu also stated that the upcoming process in Syria would not be an easy one. "We still believe it will be a difficult process. Nobody should think that these structures can be changed easily," he said.
Kurds constitute no threat for Turkey
Davutoglu has said Turkey neither considered Kurds a threat, nor used them as a threat policy.
Responding to questions in a live TV broadcast on Friday, Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmet Davutoglu said, "We never perceive our Kurdish brothers as a threat".
The minister said Turkey would not accept any ethnical or sectarian tension with any group, underscoring that Kurdish people lived in harmony with the people of Iran, Iraq and Syria.
"We will not let our Kurdish brothers suffer, neither in Iraq nor in Syria. We will not present them as a threat policy either," he said.
Davutoglu also underscored that Turkey did not want any terrorist structures in Syrian territory close to the Turkish border.
"This has nothing to do with ethnicity, religion or support. We consider PKK a threat. We will not permit such a structure around our borders. This is a stance against terrorist organization PKK," he said.
