Roving Periscope: Walking back to the Ottoman past, Turkey rebrands itself as Turkiye
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Ever since he became Turkey’s President in 2014, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 68, has been trying to resurrect the ‘glory’ of the Ottoman Empire that disintegrated in 1924 and restructured the Middle East of the present era.
With this aim, he has been firing on all cylinders, forging new alliances, changing old ones, and even enticing Israel and shunning Saudi Arabia. Not only this, he tried to forge a non-Arab bloc within the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the 57-nation body next only to the United Nations in terms of the number of members, and sought to enlist the support of Pakistan and Malaysia in it in 2019, annoying the Arabs.
Erdogan sought to dislodge the Arabs from the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood and reclaim the Ottoman Empire-cum-Caliphate that led the Sunni Muslims for six centuries.
To buttress his Ottoman claims, the Turkish TV serial Diliris: Ertugral, about the founder of the last Sunni Muslim Empire, sought to gather global Muslim support for its resurrection in recent years.
Now, Erdogan has got his country’s globally known name, Turkey, changed to its old name Turkiye, which is also its official name within the country.
The Republic of Turkey is a transcontinental country located mainly in Anatolia in Western Asia, with a portion in the Balkans in Southeast Europe.
The move comes ahead of Turkey’s presidential election in 2023 and the centenary of the nation’s founding after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
On Thursday, the UN announced that Turkey, at the behest of President Erdogan, will now be known as Turkiye in all languages, with immediate effect.
The UN’s chief spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, said the world body’s headquarters in New York received Ankara’s official letter about this change on Wednesday.
A day before, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu had tweeted a photo of himself signing the letter, addressed to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
“With the letter I sent to the UN Secretary-General today, we are registering our country’s name in foreign languages at the UN as ‘Turkiye,'” he wrote, the media reported.
The name change would bring to an end the process of “increasing the brand value of our country,” an initiative started by President Erdogan, who has led the country in different capacities for almost two decades.
Over the past few years, the country has sought to change the branding of its products from “Made in Turkey” to “Made in Turkiye.”
