Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is to visit Albania and Serbia this week, where he is expected to boost his country's economic and diplomatic ties with the Balkans.
Erdogan is due on Thursday in Albania to inaugurate the Great Mosque of Tirana. The largest mosque in the Balkans, its construction was financed by Turkey.
When he hosted Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in February, Erdogan pointed out that Turkey was among the five largest foreign investors in Albania with $3.5 billion (3.2 billion euros) committed there.
More than 600 Turkish companies employ more than 15,000 Albanian workers, he added.
The two NATO member countries also cooperate in the military field. Tirana's military arsenal includes Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones, the first of which arrived this year.
On Friday, Erdogan will head to Serbia, where Turkey made a major political comeback in 2017 with a landmark visit to Belgrade.
At the time, Erdogan and his Serbian counterpart Aleksandar Vucic mended ties between their countries.
Five centuries of the Ottoman presence in Serbia have weighed heavily on relations between Belgrade and Ankara.
Another source of tension has been the cultural and historic ties between Turkey and Serbia's former breakaway province of Kosovo. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, a move Belgrade still refuses to recognise.
Military Cooperation
Occasionally the ties between Turkey and Serbia were frosty, including when Ankara last year sold drones to Kosovo sparking anger of Belgrade that deemed the move "unacceptable".
But the row could be resolved with a new cooperation agreement, estimated Vuksanovic.
He expected the talks in Belgrade to focus on "military cooperation, the position of Turkish business companies, and attempts by Belgrade to persuade Ankara to tone down support for Kosovo".
Even though the rapprochement between Ankara and Belgrade is relatively recent, the economic ties between the two countries are already significant.
Turkish investments in Serbia have increased from one million to 400 million dollars in the past decade, according to the Turkey-Serbia business council, quoted in June by Turkey's Anadolu news agency.
Turkish exports to Serbia reached $2.13 billion in 2022, up from $1.14 billion in 2020, according to Serbian official figures.
Serbia is also an important tourist destination for Turkish nationals, second only to Bosnia.
With AFP
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