Ali gets to the roots of Erdogan's Brotherhood connections

Director of the Middle East Center for Studies in Paris (CEMO), Abdel Rahim Ali, revealed Friday that relations between the Muslim Brotherhood and Ankara dated back to the early 1960s, when Necmettin Erbakan, the godfather of the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey, released the manifesto of founding the branch of the Islamist group in Turkey.

Erbakan, he said, called this manifesto "Milli Gorus", Turkish for "national vision".

He added at a seminar by CEMO in Paris, titled "Turkish foreign policies and their disastrous consequences on Europe", that in the manifesto, Erbakan demonstrated clear influences from Sayyed Qotb, the theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

"Soon after this, Erbakan founded a movement in Germany and gave it the same name," Ali said.

"In 1995, the movement was called the Islamic Community of Milli Gorus," he added.

He noted that this opened the door for the same movement to take root and grow throughout the whole of Europe.

İt established branches in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Austria and the United Kingdom, he said.

He added that the movement owned and controlled hundreds of mosques in the same countries.

Ali noted that the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, which is controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, organized its first youth camp in northern Cyprus in 1970.

Kamal al-Helbawi, a member of the Egyptian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, was one of the senior members of the assembly, Ali said.

He added that Helbawi, who oversaw the camp, wrote a secret report about the camp, in which he mentioned two Turkish youngmen.

"He described them as potential leaders," Ali said. "These two youngmen were Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gul," he added.

Attending the seminar was a large host of researchers and experts. They included Ahmed Youssef Executive Director of CEMO, Roland Lombardi, Joachim Veliocas, Pierre Berthelot, Garen Shnorhokian. Several Middle East specialists from Europe also attended the seminar, along with a large number of Arab and French journalists.