Ever since Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi became the country's president in June 2014, ties between Cairo and Ankara have been on the decline. The Egyptian leader's struggle against the Muslim Brotherhood set his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who identifies with the movement, against him. As a result, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu's Wednesday announcement that "Turkey would sign a maritime border agreement with Egypt" took many by surprise.
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This wasn't the first surprising maritime move by Anakara. In December, Israel Hayom reported former admiral Cihat Yayci, a close confidant of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had proposed a bilateral agreement on the countries' shared exclusive economic zones in the Mediterranean Sea. Four months earlier, Ankara sent a clear message to Jerusalem on its desire to start talks on the subject but due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, talks were never held.
According to Yaici's proposal, both countries' maritime borders would join together at Cyprus' expense. Now, Erdogan's confidante has come up with a plan for a border agreement with Egypt that is in line with the maritime border agreement Ankara signed with Libya in 2019 and is also roughly in line with its proposal to Jerusalem.
In an interview with the Dogu Akzeniz Politik website, Yaici called Cavusoglu's proposal "promising and positive." He said, "Countries need to act pragmatically. For many years, we've said that determining exclusive economic maritime zones with Egypt was a decisive factor in determining our southern maritime borders."
Yaici added that "the demarcation of the exclusive economic waters with Egypt should start from the eastern side of the agreement we signed with Libya and continue to the west of the expected borderline with Israel. In this way, the agreement will also spoil the expectations of the Greeks and the Cypriots."
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