ABSTRACT
Both Greece and Turkey occupy a strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near and Middle East. However, with Turkey being far more populous (c. 70 million, with the second largest army in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-NATO, as against c. 11 million for Greece), as well as geographically stretching from the borderlands of Iran, Iraq and Syria in the east and south to Greece and Bulgaria in the west and north-west, it is arguably more important to any great power politics game than Greece. Turkey controls the straits from the Black Sea and lives at a stone’s throw distance from Russia, making it constitute a major transit route for petroleum and gas to the West, the most recent addition to such real estate being the Baku (Azerbaijan)–Ceyhan (Turkey’s Mediterranean port opposite Cyprus) pipeline. Yet, Greece is in a position to launch strategic initiatives by virtue of its position in the Aegean (a major international trade route from and to the Black Sea and an important trade corridor for the Suez Canal traffic); witness the fact that Germany did not bother to militarily occupy Turkey during the Second World War, inasmuch as it was in possession of the Aegean and Crete, thus controlling the sea and air traffic from the Black Sea and of most of the eastern Mediterranean. Modern Greece was one of the states emerging out of the gradual decline of the Ottoman Empire and, as a modern nation-state, took its shape in 1923 with the Treaty of Lausanne, after having lost the war to Turkey in Asia Minor (since 1923 the only territorial addition to Greece has been the acquisition of the Dodecanese islands from Italy in 1947, in the south-east Aegean). The 1930 Venizelos-Atatu¨rk Convention of Friendship and Reconciliation aimed, among others, at strengthening bilateral relations between the two countries in the Balkan and eastern Mediterranean theatres. However, the Greek-Turkish conflict was bound to re-emerge in the first half of the 1950s over the issue of Cyprus. Turkey attributed to Greece Cyprus’s wish for union with Greece in the 1950s (see entry on Cyprus below) and began adopting an overall revisionist position regarding its bilateral relations with Greece on a number of issues, such as the Greek minority in Istanbul, the Turkish minority in Greek Thrace, the position of the Orthodox Patriarchate and the Aegean Sea. In 1955 mob violence in Istanbul and Izmir severely reduced the remaining Greek communities there, while in 1973-74, in parallel with and even before invading and partitioning Cyprus, Turkey began questioning the status of the Aegean. There are several elements to the Aegean dispute. First, Turkey does not recognize that the Greek eastern Aegean islands have continental shelf, arguing that they rest on Anatolia (Asia Minor). Second, Greece has now extended its territorial waters to six nautical miles (11 km) and reserved the right to extend them to 12 miles whenever it sees fit to do so; Turkey’s Grand National Assembly has threatened that this would mean war and suggested that a median line be drawn in the Aegean. Third, Turkey recognizes a limit of only six nautical miles for Greek airspace (Flight Information Region-FIR), as this should equate to territorial waters. In 1974 Turkey issued a notice to airmen (NOTAM 714) and to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) requiring aircraft flying
over the eastern half of the Aegean and the Dodecanese to report to the Istanbul FIR. This NOTAM was withdrawn in 1980, but since then Turkish military aircraft fly regularly in the outer four miles of Greek-claimed airspace, the result being several dogfights between Greek and Turkish jet fighters over the Aegean. In May 2006, during a Greek-Turkish dogfight, two jets collided, resulting in the death of the Greek pilot who failed to eject. Another dangerous incident, in January 1996, concerned the islets of Imia (Kardak), half-way between the Greek island of Kalymnos and the Turkish C¸avus¸ Adasi (Kato Is.). Both Greece and Turkey amassed their warships; the crisis was defused following behind-thescenes diplomacy and a public announcement by US President Bill Clinton. Turkey also accuses Greece of militarizing the eastern Aegean islands in defiance of the Treaty of Lausanne. Greece counters that this legal restriction no longer applies after the 1936 Montreux Convention, when Turkey militarized the Bosphorus Straits and the Metaxas regime in Athens consequently asserted Greece’s rights to militarize the northern Aegean islands, as they were part and parcel of the same strategic theatre. Greece prefers international mediation and wants the issues to be resolved by the International Court of Justice, whereas Turkey prefers a bilateral resolution framework.
