Turkey's fm says cold war structures should be erased from region

WASHINGTON (A.A) - Turkey's foreign minister said on Thursday that Cold War structures should be erased from the Middle East. Ahmet Davutoglu said Turkey wanted Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad to be the Mikhail Gorbachev in Syria however he preferred to become the Slobodan Milosevic in Syria. Davutoglu said the world had faced three major tremors in the last two decades, including "geopolitical tremor" after the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, "security tremor" after the 9/11 attacks, and "economic-political tremor" that occurred in 2011.  "All these tremors are the natural outcome of lack of a new international economic, political and cultural order that we need in the post Cold War era," Davutoglu addressed students at the George Washington University. Davutoglu said, "we did not have a new set of norms or a new institutional structure to respond these crises since the Cold War." The foreign minister said the clash in the Middle East was between the Cold War structure and the new dynamic powers of the society, not between Sunnis and Shiites, Muslim and non-Muslim, Arab and non-Arab, and Western or non-Western. Davutoglu said Hosni Mubarak, Bashar al-Assad, Bin Ali and Moammar Gadhafi were all continuation of Cold Ward ideology, which had to end in 1990s. Everybody had to support developments in the Arab world, Davutoglu said. Davutoglu said, "if head of a state leaves office through peaceful methods, that regime is democratic, but if there is no other former head of a state in a country, that country is autocratic. Look at Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein, Saleh or Mubarak in the Middle East, there are no other president or prime minister before these people in those countries." Minister Davutoglu said Turkey was popular in Arab world, and Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan was welcomed cheerfully in Cairo and Libya because of Turkey's democracy, economic success and active foreign policy through which Turkey raised its voice against any type of injustice in the world. Moreover, Davutoglu said if Turkey had become a member of the European Union (EU), the union could have had a stronger and more dynamic economy and could have become a more efficient and geopolitical power in the world.  Davutoglu also said Turkey still maintained its EU integration target. (Reporting by Mehmet Toroglu and Bariskan Unal)