Arab region seeks Turkey's mediator role, ex-Lebanon PM says

The Arab region expects Turkey to play a mediation role, particularly in Syria and Libya, the former Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said yesterday.

According to Anadolu, Siniora, who held the prime minister’s office between 2005 and 2009, was speaking in an online panel discussion on the “Changing Situation of the Middle East and the Prospects of Cooperation and Peace,” organised by the Ankara-based Middle East Research Center (ORSAM) on Tuesday

Siniora touched on the rising problems in the world, saying that “international resolutions are ignored and cooperation among countries is still more uncertain than ever.”

Instability in the region encouraged some “regional and global powers to use the Arab countries as a battlefield,” rather than engaging in cooperation, giving “regional powers, Iran and Israel in particular, a growing role in furthering the destabilisation of the region by direct aggression or instigating internal conflicts,” Siniora said.

He urged regional powers to work together and utilise their resources for their own good as “more and more pressure will be exercised by the superpowers and they are looking for battlefields to exercise new weapons and influence and we will be the fuel for that and nothing more, and after they end up destroying the region, they will lend us money to exercise their 21st century type of colonialism.”

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