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French President Emmanuel Macron accused Turkey of taking a “bellicose” stance towards its NATO allies, saying tensions could ease if his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, showed respect and did not lie.
In an interview with al-Jazeera broadcast on Saturday, Macron condemned Turkey’s behavior in Syria, Libya and the Mediterranean, saying: “Turkey has a bellicose attitude towards its NATO allies.”
He also tried to defuse tensions with Muslims around the world after increasingly heated rhetoric following the assassination of the French school teacher, Samuel Paty, who showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad alongside other cartoons as part of a discussion on the freedom of expression.
Macron said that France’s wish was for things to “calm down” but for this to happen it was essential that “the Turkish president respects France, respects the European Union, respects its values, does not lie and does not insult.”
He noted that France had offered its condolences to Turkey after the deadly earthquake in the Aegean and had also offered to send aid to the site.
He described Turkey’s intervention in Syria as a surprise and aggression for NATO allies, and said Ankara had failed to abide by an arms embargo on Libya while displaying a “deeply aggressive” attitude in the eastern Mediterranean.
“I observe that Turkey has imperial leanings in the region and I think these imperial leanings are not a good thing for the stability of the region, that’s all.”
There have been weeks of tensions between France and Turkey, which peaked last weekend when Erdogan questioned Macron’s mental health.
France responded by taking the very unusual step of calling its ambassador in Ankara for consultations. On Saturday, Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said France would send its ambassador back to Ankara after a week’s absence.
Le Drian told RTL that Turkey made “the deliberate decision to instrumentalize” the beheading of the French teacher, accusing Ankara of launching “a heinous and slanderous campaign against us.”
However, the minister said Turkey’s condemnation of a knife attack on a church in Nice this week had been “different, clear, unequivocal, but that does not exclude clarifications from Ankara.”
“We asked our ambassador to return to Ankara tomorrow to follow up on this request for clarification and explanation with the Turkish authorities,” he added.
In the al-Jazeera interview, Macron said he understood that the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad could be shocking, while attacking the “lies” that the French state was behind them.
France is on the brink of an early September reissue of cartoons of the prophet by the weekly Charlie Hebdo, which was followed by an attack in front of its former offices, the beheading of a teacher and an attack on a church in Nice on Thursday. left three dead. .
Macron sparked protests across the Muslim world after Paty’s death by saying that France would never renounce its laws allowing blasphemous cartoons.
But in an apparent attempt to reach out to Muslims, Macron sought a softer tone in a lengthy interview with the Qatar-based channel.
“I can understand that people can be scandalized by cartoons, but I will never accept that violence can be justified,” he said.
“I understand the feelings that this awakens, I respect them. But I want you to understand the role I have. My role is to calm things down, as I am doing here, but at the same time it is to protect these rights ”.
He added: “I will always defend in my country the freedom to speak, write, think, draw.”
Macron lashed out at political leaders’ “distortions” of the prophet’s cartoons, saying that too often people were led to believe they were a creation of the French state.
He maintained “a confusion that has been fed by many media – and sometimes political and religious leaders – which means that these cartoons are in some way the project or the creation of the French government or the president.”
He also denounced calls for a boycott of French products, backed in particular by Erdogan and taken up by some retailers in Muslim countries, as “unworthy” and “unacceptable.”
He said the campaign was created by some private groups “who relied on lies … sometimes from other leaders” about the cartoons.
Even before the attack on Paty, Macron had promised a tough new campaign against Islamist radicalism in France, which has claimed hundreds of lives since 2015.
