AEGEAN PROVOCATION – TURKEY, GREECE

Then came the next question, this time asking my opinion about Turkish violations of Greek airspace. Apparently, Athens has once again been captured by the airspace violation paranoia, a Greek delusion which I thought had long ago been left back in the 1980s. But why is Greece once again trying to resurrect a long-buried issue between Ankara and Athens and resorting to such ridiculous rhetoric? During the interview, I realized that much of the Greece’s media, and thus its public opinion, was consumed by the so-called ‘Turkish violations of airspace’ and the ‘Aegean crisis.’ I told the station that most Turkish people didn’t even know anything about the issue and that, in any case, they wouldn’t be interested.

Why is Greece doing this? Why is Athens, as our General Staff so aptly put it, trying to provoke Ankara just before next month’s Salonika summit when Greece is due to hand over the EU term presidency to Italy? Is the Greek administration preparing to take the issue to Brussels in order to force the Union to make a decision against Turkey? If this is Greece’s real agenda, that would signal a shift in the Simitis government’s recent policy towards our country, a policy which Athens has been pursuing for four years now. The most probable reason for such a shift would be that Greece is planning to keep a ‘strategically weakened Turkey’ – especially in the wake of the Iraq war – under international pressure and so force Ankara to make huge concessions on certain issues.

Whatever the reasons for the Greek policy of provocation, Turkey should not let these reasons lead us astray from the EU path or weaken our resolve to take necessary steps.”