In economic difficulty, Turkey wants to reconnect with Saudi Arabia, after years of cold.
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In preparation for months, the visit to Saudi Arabia of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Thursday 28 and Friday April 29, aims to pick up the pieces of the damaged relationship between the two rival Sunni powers, since the journalist’s assassination and Saudi opponent Jamal Khashoggi in the premises of the Kingdom Consulate, in Istanbul, in 2018.
Invited by King Salman, with whom he shared the Iftar meal (breakup of the fast) Thursday evening, Mr. Erdogan met in the process the Crown Prince Mohammed Ben Salman, with whom relations were considerably cooled in recent years due to the Khashoggi affair.
Critic of the prince, especially in the columns of the Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi was seen for the last time when he entered the premises of the consulate of his country in Istanbul, on October 2, 2018, to carry out administrative. He never came out and his body has never been found.
According to several foreign secret services, whose Turkish services, which apparently had a listening system at the Saudi consulate, he was killed and then dismembered within the consulate by a team of fifteen people who came especially from the kingdom to This effect.
At the time, the Turkish press had multiplied the sordid revelations, since the description of the bone saw used to dismember the journalist’s body until its possible dissolution in the acid in the consul’s bathtub. Mr. Erdogan had made this “political assassination” his workhorse, repeating to the envy that the order to kill the journalist had come “from the highest spheres of the Saudi government”.
Transfer of the Khashoggi file to Saudi justice
These revelations had plunged the Saudi monarchy in one of the worst diplomatic crises in his history, the Crown Prince Ben Salman being presented as the main sponsor of the murder, in Ankara as in Washington.
Four years later, Turkey is burning to bury the ax of war. Addressing the media before his departure for the coastal city of Djedda on Thursday evening, President Erdogan had words that could not be more conciliatory towards the kingdom, quoting the end of the sacred month of Ramadan as the most appropriate moment for his visit. This is supposed to “reconstruct and strengthen fraternal links”. “Thanks to our common efforts, I believe that we will bear our relationships beyond what they were in the past,” he said.
His stay in Saudi Arabia, the first for five years, marks the culmination of diplomatic work of several months. Announced on several occasions by the Turkish part, in January, then in February, the visit had to be postponed, officially for calendar reasons, in reality to respond to the Requests of the Kingdom.
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