Remember the days when the late Libyan leader Muammer Gaddafi would hit the headlines for pitching his large Bedouin tent in world capitals when he travelled abroad? His flying tent, along with his elite cadre of female bodyguards would attract a lot more media attention than the political or diplomatic outcome of his visits.<\/p>\n
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan does not travel with a tent. He air-freights his armoured vehicles and a small army of menacing bouncers, instead.<\/p>\n
Like the idiosyncratic third-world rulers before him, he is becoming synonymous with the antics of his farcical travelling circus.<\/p>\n
The chaotic scenes outside the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C on Thursday where Mr Erdogan had been invited to speak were widely reported in the world\u2019s media. As the Washington Post<\/a> put it \u201cTurkey\u2019s Erdogan came to Washington, and things got a bit crazy\u201d. The Guardian<\/a> quoted The National Press Club President Thomas Burr as saying: \u201cTurkey\u2019s leader and his security team are guests in the United States. They have no right to lay their hands on reporters or protesters or anyone else for that matter, when the people they were apparently roughing up seemed to be merely doing their jobs or exercising the rights they have in this country<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Neither the President nor his entourage seem remotely concerned about the uproar their thuggish behaviour caused in the USA.<\/p>\n If there is any diplomatic fall-out, their hosts are keeping tight-lipped about it.<\/p>\n But the fracas in Washington is not the first one Mr Erdogan\u2019s security apparatus has been involved in. Throughout his region-wide trip to Latin America earlier this year, his bodyguards brawled with local security teams and attacked protestors.<\/p>\n In Ecuador, three women were violently ejected by Turkish security guards during a speech by Mr. Erdogan and an Ecuadorean member of parliament was injured. It prompted the Ecuadorian government to protest to Turkey.<\/p>\n Earlier, in October 2015, during the official visit of President Erdogan to Brussels, there were several skirmishes between his bodyguards and Belgian security personnel.<\/p>\n Before his arrival in Washington to attend a nuclear security summit this week, Mr Erdogan\u2019s supporters had started another campaign of their own, this time on Twitter. The hashtag, #WeLoveErdogan, had high-profile contributions such as the one from the deputy prime minister Mehmet Simsek, praising the President as \u201cThe hope of the oppressed, the Grand Master of our country\u2019s structural transformation and rebirth<\/em>\u201d.<\/p>\n When the micro-blogging site removed the hashtag for being promoted through false accounts, Turkey\u2019s justice minister Bekir Bozdag accused Twitter of censorship. \u201cWho instructed you to remove the #WeLoveErdogan hashtag? Was it a country, a person, a terrorist group, or somebody else?\u201d he, asked, before adding: \u201cI believe this is part of a global operation against our president<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n