Davutoglu derides opposition’s ‘lone Turkey’ claim
"World leaders are pouring into Turkey. Which loneliness are you talking about?" says Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.
EDIRNE, Turkey
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu refuted opposition's claims Wednesday that Turkey had problems with its neighbors and was now left alone in the region.
"World leaders are pouring into Turkey. Which loneliness are you talking about?" Davutoglu told a provincial meeting of his Justice and Development Party in Turkey's northwestern province of Edirne.
He disputed the “loneliness” claim by highlighting the list of leaders who recently came to Turkey.
Since early December, several world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Pope Francis, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani have visited the country.
Davutoglu and his cabinet members also visited several countries like Iraq, Greece, Poland, Macedonia and Kuwait in December where they held talks to boost bilateral economic and political ties.
Turkish premier said the government kept a busy schedule in foreign politics, which, he argued, the main opposition party "would get exhausted just by following it."
He said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition Republican People's Party, was accusing the government of being loneliness "because of his own problems of losing influence among district heads of his own party."
"Turkey never does two things. Neither it takes wrong acts, nor it stands by wrong people or in places where human dignity is disrespected," the premier said.
Davutoglu also previously blamed the main opposition CHP for supporting Syria's President Bashar al-Assad and those staging 2013 military coup in Egypt against the country's first democratically-elected president, Mohamed Morsi.
"We would rather be alone than shaking hands with murderers and barbarians," he said.
The premier said they would bond in unity with all neighbors that shared a common culture and "did not tyrannize their own people."
Turkey has adopted an open-door policy for civilians fleeing from war and conflict-ridden neighbors, Syria and Iraq.
It gave refuge to at least 1.6 million Syrians since the beginning of the civil war in March 2011, and spent more than $5 billion on them so far, the country’s Finance Ministry figures show.
The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which seized large swathes of Iraqi territories, has also forced thousands of Turkmen, Arabs, Christians and Ezidis to flee the clashes.
So far, about 2,000 Ezidi refugees from Iraq have crossed the Habur border post to seek refuge in southeast Turkey, where they are hosted in tents and prefabricated housing units in the region.
