Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu

Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu    (diplomat, politician)
Born	5 February 1968
Nationality	Turkish
Alma mater	Ankara University, Long Island University, Bilkent University, London School of Economics
Turkish Foreign Minister that is not a Bilderberger.  Turkey/Minister of Foreign Affairs In office 24. November 2015 - Present  Turkey/Minister of Foreign Affairs In office 29. August 2014 - 28. August 2015  Turkey/Minister of European Union Affairs In office 25 December 2013 - 29 August 2014  President/Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe In office 25 January 2010 - 25 January 2012  Turkey/Member of the Grand National Assembly  In office 1 November 2015 - 10 July 2018

Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu is a Turkish diplomat and politician who has served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Turkey since 24 November 2015, where he has been part in the effort to change government in Syria. He previously served in the same position from August 2014 to August 2015.

He is a member of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, where he represents Antalya Province. First elected to Parliament in the 2002 general election, he is a founding member of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). He was the president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe from 2010 to 2012.

Early life and education

Çavuşoğlu was born at Alanya, Antalya Province. He graduated from Ankara University Faculty of Political Science, in 1988 where he studied international relations. He then received a masters in economics from Long Island University in New York, and studied for his doctorate at Bilkent University. He was a research fellow at London School of Economics, where he was for a time president of the Turkish Society. Çavuşoğlu did not receive a PhD.

Career

While serving in parliament, he has chaired the Committee on Migration, Refugees and Population. In November 2009, he met the foreign minister of Russia, Sergey Lavrov, in the context of a report that the Assembly was preparing on the Soviet famine of 1932–1933.

Council of Europe

Çavuşoğlu joined the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in 2003 and soon after was named the head of the Turkish delegation and a vice-president of the Assembly. During the January 2010 session of the Assembly, he was nominated and elected on 25 January 2010 to replace outgoing President Lluís Maria De Puig of Spain. In the October reshuffle, this was the reason given for why he did not receive extra responsibilities in Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government. His candidacy for this post was supported by all of Turkey's main parties. He became president just months before Turkey took up the chairmanship of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe (November 2010) and at the same time that there was a Turkish president of the Congress of the Council of Europe. In 2012, he was succeeded by France's Jean-Claude Mignon.

2014 Turkish local elections

Çavuşoğlu was criticized by Hürriyet because of his intervention in the municipality election in Antalya that took place on 30 March 2014. When the opposing party candidate Mustafa Akaydin was ahead of the ruling party candidate, he visited the courthouse with his supporters and interrupted the counting process. After his interruption, counting of votes was stopped. It was claimed that the votes not already counted were from suburbs where the opposing party had more supporters.

2017 Rotterdam landing ban

On 11 March 2017, Çavuşoğlu was banned from landing in Rotterdam over remarks he had made about the way the Netherlands was treating Turkish émigrés, after the Dutch government had threatened to deny landing rights. Çavuşoğlu had planned to organize a large gathering to talk about the 2017 Turkish constitutional referendum, in which many Dutch-based émigrés can vote. However, his presence was claimed by the Dutch authorities to be a threat to public safety, and Çavuşoğlu was turned away, despite being the Foreign Minister. Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called the Netherlands, "Nazi remnants" and "fascists," which Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte called "a crazy remark." Çavuşoğlu followed by defending Erdoğan's remark and by saying that the Netherlands was the "capital of fascism".

War on Syria

Since before the war started in 2011, Turkey has supported many proxy armies in Syria, in an attempt to topple the government there. In the period Çavuşoğlu has been foreign minister, this covert and at times overt effort has continued unabated.

“It is not possible to give up our rights and interests in the Eastern Mediterranean just because sanctions will come or because the EU will criticize us.”
Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu (14 December, 2020) 

Personal life

He is married with one child. He speaks Turkish, English, German, and Japanese. He also studies the Russian language, only having spoken public it in limited settings, and is being as he described on "an intermediate level". His brother Hasan is the president of the Alanyaspor football club.

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Munich Security Conference/2015	6 February 2015	8 February 2015	Germany Munich Bavaria	"400 high-ranking decision-makers in international politics, including some 20 heads of state and government as well as more than 60 foreign and defence ministers, met in Munich to discuss current crises and conflicts."
Munich Security Conference/2016	12 February 2016	14 February 2016	Germany Munich Bavaria	The 52nd Munich Security Conference
Munich Security Conference/2017	17 February 2017	19 February 2017	Germany Munich Bavaria	The 53rd Munich Security Conference
Munich Security Conference/2018	12 February 2018	14 February 2018	Germany Munich Bavaria	The 54th Munich Security Conference
Munich Security Conference/2020	14 February 2020	16 February 2020	Germany Munich Bavaria	The 56th Munich Security Conference, in 2020, "welcomed an unprecedented number of high-ranking international decision-makers."
WEF/Annual Meeting/2019	22 January 2019	25 January 2019	World Economic Forum Switzerland
WEF/Annual Meeting/2020	21 January 2020	24 January 2020	World Economic Forum Switzerland	This mega-summit of the world's ruling class and their political and media appendages happens every year, but 2020 was special, as the continuous corporate media coverage of COVID-19 started more or less from one day to the next on 20/21 January 2020, coinciding with the start of the meeting.

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:How Spin and Lies Fuel a Bloody War of Attrition in Ukraine	Article	13 February 2023	Medea Benjamin Nicolas J. S. Davies	President Eisenhower famously said that only an "alert and knowledgeable citizenry" can "guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. An "alert and knowledgeable citizenry" would surely then demand that our government stop fueling this war and instead support immediate peace negotiations.

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