EN - FR - Yükselen Afrika ve Türkiye / Rising Africa and Turkey 3

252 Yükselen Afrika ve Türkiye / Rising Africa and TurkeyThe international oil crisis of the early 1970s coincided with severalevents, which had direct implications to Africa, and several Asian and LatinAmerican countries as far as their relations to the West were concerned. Themajor one was the breaking of relations with Israel over the issue of Palestineand the improved Afro-Arab relations in 1973. By 1976, the Arab League hadestablished six institutions for the provision of aid for African countries. Someof these were established for the purposes of cooperating with Black Africanstates and others were restricted to the Arab League and its own African members.By 1976, the three main funding institutions had funds totaling USD 456million of which USD 200 million was for soft loans. Among the leading institutionswere such as the Arab bank for Economic Development in Africa(established in 1975), Special Arab Fund for Africa (established in 1974) andKuwait Fund for Aid and Economic Development (established in 1975). Thelatter was the leading donor on GDP per capita in the World by then.The Arab countries had conditionally tied their aid, in that they did notsupport countries that had ties with Israel or countries that showed any hostilityto the Arab world. Special consideration was given to Islamic religiousinstitutions and Qoranic education. Thus it was during this period that theEconomic Commission for Africa decided to include Arabic in the list ofworking languages of the organization. At the same time, visits betweenAfrican and Arab leaders increasingly became significant in the post October1973 period. Other important events internationally during this time were theliberation of Saigon and the victory of the liberation movements inMozambique and Angola in 1975 and 1976 respectively, which were followedby the liberation of Zimbabwe in 1980. In 1979, the Ministerial Conference ofthe Group of 77 was held in Arusha, Tanzania in the background of thesedevelopments, with OPEC showing the way forward. The agenda of this conferencewas on how the Third World Countries could negotiate for a NewInternational Economic Order. The Group of 77, formed in a meeting held inAlgiers in 1967, had developed out of a felt need for the Third WorldCountries to speak one voice at the UN Conference on Trade andDevelopment (UNCTAD) and other conferences concerned with world economicmatters.In 1977, a military dictatorship claiming to extol the virtues of Islamreplaced a populist social democratic regime in Pakistan. The two revolutionsof 1978-9, in Iran and Afghanistan were to form a watershed in internationalpolitics. The Khomeiniite take-over was one of those rare conjectures in whichthe revolution and counter-revolution were condensed in the same moment. Itoverthrew the Shah regime, which had previously enjoyed tremendous