We hope that the Greek Prime Minister stressed the obvious to President Trump, regarding the constellation of illegal actions by Turkey in the sea, on the land and in the air
File Photo: Ο πρωθυπουργός Κυριάκος Μητσοτάκης. Γραφείο Τύπου Πρωθυπουργού
ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ ΑΡΘΡΑ
At such moments of extreme tension because of the so many illegal actions by Turkey, it does not behoove anyone to second guess our leaders. Yet every thinking citizen cannot but be upset, to say the least, by the divisive character of Greeks, when it comes to foreign policy: focusing on petty issues, insistence on party politics as well as insistence on divisiveness are the order of the day, rendering Greece (as well as Cyprus) an easy prey to all those with interests contrary to ours.
We hope that regardless of the reasons that President Tramp called (twice as it later turned out!) to the Greek PM, the latter did not hesitate to build his case on the recent announcements on the matter by the State Department itself! Official announcements that show Turkey as the state that continuously violates the sovereign rights of her neighbors. After all, the illegal occupation of 37 % of Cyprus (an EU member state!) has been going on for 46 years now (it is to the PM’s credit that he stresses this in all his interviews to foreign reporters and media). On top of the tight hold and colonization of occupied Cyprus, Turkey has recently done the following:
- Has been invading for almost two years the EEZ of the Republic of Cyprus for illegal drilling for oil and gas. Her drill ships are accompanied by war ships, indicative of her belligerence.
- The current attempt for exploration into the Greek continental shelf, again with the accompaniment of warships!
- The multiple attempts to violate the Greek land and sea borders via illegal migrants posing as war refugees (a proven lie, as the vast majority of them are evidently from other countries, often African, that are closer to Europe and far away from Greece or Turkey!)
- The violation of Greece’s right to search and rescue missions in her own waters, as shown two days ago in the rescue of ca. 100 migrants originating from Turkey in a ship in distress (some 20 nm west of the island of Chalki). A Turkish rescue ship tried to prevent the rescue mission and ended up grabbing from the sea 15 or so of these hapless people. Turkey receives billions in EU aid just to keep Syrian war refugees and other migrants in camps; should perhaps the EU impose a fine to Turkey, for her loose control on people she is being paid to keep (at 100-fold the annual aid per migrant)?
- The continued violations of our air space, and to top it all the recent very inflammatory rhetoric from President Erdogan and his associates, amounting to war cries.
The simple point to be made to President Trump from our side should be one: no US government would tolerate behavior such as that of Turkey coming from any of the US neighbors; be that China or Japan violating the US EEZ around the Hawaiian Islands, or Russia doing something similar in Alaska, or Canada and Mexico trying to wreak havoc on the land, air and see borders of the continental US. To use president Trump’s own phraseology “The Turks were not in Normandy”. In actuality, the chromite Turkey kept selling to the Nazis since 1941, and paid for in confiscated gold from Jewish interns of death camps, helped immensely the Nazi war machine, so Turkey was in Normandy, on the wrong side. As a matter of fact, right before the Allied landings in Normandy, the Allies had to bomb all the bridges between Bulgaria and Turkey in order to avert an imminent invasion by Turkey into Bulgaria! Good to keep in mind that the sale of chromite (an important war materiel) to the Nazis started after an agreement between Germany and Turkey just before Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union. This agreement nullified a previous agreement with france and England to deny Turkish chromite to Germany. Turkish PM Saratsoglou was to boast that Germany’s attack on the Soviets became possible just because of her agreement to secure chromite from Turkey! (see Frank Weber, The evasive neutral).
The obvious tactic of “the smart chess player”, Mr. Erdogan, is to claim everything that belongs to neighboring countries, blackmailing his seeming importance as a world power, vis-à-vis NATO, the EU, Russia, China etc. Let our PM stress to President Trump that Turkey habitually violates most of the agreements treaties and conventions she has signed and is subjected to (e.g. Treaty of Lausanne, UN resolutions on Cyprus, territorial integrity of Iraq): with every new of her violations one tends to forget the previous ones! For example, there have been UN resolutions (from 1976 onwards) to give the city of Varosha (since 1974 a ghost town) in the part of Cyprus occupied by Turkey to her rightful inhabitants. Turkey has been defying such resolutions all these past decades and now wishes to make a naval base in or around Varosha.
- Until now Turkey has been trying to justify her illegal acts as “her rights”, while she labels the defensive actions taken by Greece and Cyprus to such aggression as “denial of her legal rights”!
- President Erdogan has not hesitated to often call (whenever he so wishes) many European leaders, including Frau Merkel, as “Hitler”, a person he has also declared that he admires; anyone who follows his actions does not have the slightest of doubts.
The red lines on the ground, such as our borders, are there to be defended, as President Trump knows full well. We hope he can understand what the Western press has been saying in so many ways: Turkey under Erdogan has become the elephant in the room of NATO (and the waiting room of the EU), the international pariah state that cares only about her own wishes (the borders of our heart as Pres. Erdogan put it in reference to the defunct Ottoman Empire) disregarding international law, the troublemaking state that is spreading everywhere creating only problems with her neighbors. For so many years the big countries in the West saw fit to meet all her illegal and illogical desires of Turkey against her neighbors (You should pay our bills because we are important to you, claimed a very high level Turkish official in the late 1970s to scholar-mediator Dankwart Rustow). This extends to states beyond the borders of Turkey, as was the case with Israel and the Mavi Marmara ship incident in 2010.
The time has come for the West to realize that appeasement has the opposite results of those intended. Otherwise the defiant state, i.e. Turkey, will learn the rightful lessons from her affected neighbors, which she systematically tramples upon, intimidates and tries to shame. No self-respecting country can accept such irresponsible behavior from a neighbor and on top an ally!
The policy of avoiding a war clash between two NATO member states makes sense if both member states respect international law. Matters become worse, if the party that systematically violates international law has the certainty (often the assurance from third parties) that it is so valuable that no matter what she does she will not be “touched”.
The list of violations of international law is a very long one; if we restrict ourselves to the recent era, since Turkey became a member of NATO, we will start with the horrible pogrom (a literal Krystallnacht) of the Greek Community in Istanbul (the community’s status is guaranteed by the Treaty of Lausanne) on 6th-7th September, 1955. The whole affair was planned and its execution supervised by none other than Turkish PM Adnan Menderes (the 2nd charge leveled against Menderes in the Special tribunal convened after the coup that overthrew his administration pertained precisely to the events of this pogrom; he was convicted to death by hanging and hanged in Sept. 1961. See Speros Vryonis, Jr. The mechanism of catastrophe). Coming to today’s violations we can just look at recent State Department official announcements calling on Turkey to stop illegal drillings in the EEZ of the Republic of Cyprus and the attempts for sea exploration in Greece’s continental shelf.
Were we to go back just over a century, we have the Three Genocides (declared as such by the International Association of Genocide Scholars) carried out by the administration of the Young Turks that put to death by execution, slaughter, hanging, rape and death marches over 3 million Christian Ottoman citizens, of Armenian, Assyrian and Greek origin (from Asia Minor and the Pontos regions).
- Turkey refuses to this day to accept the historical record, something acknowledged by the French, Swedish, and German Parliaments, and just this year the US Congress. A country that refuses to come to terms with her genocidal past, but instead claims pride in it, will soon repeat such criminal acts if given the chance.
The Turkish conduct in Cyprus, Syria, Iraq and Libya leaves no doubt about this. It is no coincidence that so many neigoring countries of Turkey and beyond, have labeled her as the international trouble maker (Israel, Egypt, Saoudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, Libyan National Parliament).
The only real question is whether the EU and the US will cite with Greece, Cyprus and all the above countries affected wrongly by Turkey, or with Turkey herself, confirming her in her worst of instincts. The so-called “middle way” is actually in her favor, as she persistently interprets international law to her liking, eliminating from the map islands for self-serving purposes such as Crete and island-states such as Cyprus (and Indonesia and the UK by extension, as well as the Florida Keys!). All this in order to state totally baseless theories, contrary to the established norms of the UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and naturally in order to avoid any judgment by the pertinent court, should matters ever reach the court.