“The martyrs of East Turkestan are our martyrs,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then mayor of Istanbul, said in 1995 as he inaugurated a park named in honour of Isa Yusuf Alptekin, the Uighur independence leader who had died in exile in Turkey.
As Turkish prime minister, Mr Erdogan had long abandoned such sentiments, which were guaranteed to anger Beijing. But last week Mr Erdogan created a firestorm by comparing China’s treatment of its Uighur population – Muslim Chinese of Turkic origin in the northwestern region of Xinjiang – to “genocide”.
