Erdogan plays for everything: the difficult decisions of Athens at 10.5 kilometers

Tayyip Erdogan brings Greek-Turkish relations to a critical crossroads, with options that not only challenge Athens and Nicosia, but highlight Turkey as the main destabilizing factor in the wider region and revive, with different dimensions of course, the “Eastern Question”.

By avoiding a direct confrontation with Turkey, both Athens and the international community are obviously sending the wrong messages to T. Erdogan, and no one now knows how far he will go or how and when he will stop.

But like the international community and especially key players, the EU In general, Washington (amid the electoral period and projected prolonged instability) limits itself to even harsh verbal formulations, while Moscow simply “plays” with Turkey according to its interests in any source of tension and crisis. is the chance to play your leftovers on the international chess board. And the escalating tension for Erdogan is now emerging as “oxygen” for his politics, as he knows that normalization at home and abroad will lead to the disintegration of his regime and power.

With regard to Syria, Iraq, the Caucasus and Libya, Erdogan finds opposing forces where Turkey’s attempt to impose will have great military and financial costs (since the dependence on Russia is significant) and that is why he considers that the ideal field for demonstration Turkey’s strength is the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean. Believing that the support of Greece by its partners in the EU (for NATO there is no problem, since Turkey is an equal member of the Alliance) will be limited, either to rhetorical condemnations, or to measures and token sanctions, while he has in his hands the “convincing role” of the immigrant.

Challenge in the air

Turkey has chosen to take the confrontation with Greece to the extreme and the incident with the government plane that transported Foreign Minister N. Dendia from Baghdad to Athens is indicative of the weather. The choice, while the Turkish authorities knew that it was a government VIP flight with the Foreign Minister as a passenger, to keep the plane in the air for twenty minutes and make trips over the Iraq-Turkey border, was hostile. . movement.

Movements like the one that N. Dendias and M. Tsavousoglou agreed in Bratislava to resume the exploratory and open communication channels and a few hours later Turkey sent the “Oruc Reis” for investigations up to a distance of 6.5 n. μ. de Kastelorizo, show that the option is not only to challenge Greek sovereign rights, but also to cut off any relationship or channel of communication between the two parties. At the level of communication between Athens and Ankara, but also at the level of rhetoric, the Turkish leadership gives the impression that the two countries are almost in a “state of war”.

The “Oruc Reis” mission of seismic studies in this area shows that Turkey and Erdogan are not the only ones seeking reconciliation and dialogue.

Legal participation

For Athens, the options are difficult. Politically, the weight of Turkey’s increasingly challenged agenda is unbearable, and while the tools of reaction are limited to the adoption in December of some sanctions, they are likely to be late and unable to contain Turkey.

It will be very difficult for the government to explain to the public that legally and diplomatically the Turkish challenge for investigations at 100, 30 or 6.5 nautical miles is the same, since it is an unlimited continental shelf and legally does not exist. The term “potential territorial waters” refers to the area between 6 and 12 o’clock, in which Greece has the right, under the Law of the Sea, to expand its territorial waters. Of course, even conducting research in this area does not mean that there is usufruct and that Turkey is gaining rights in this area.

And this fact of the legal dimension of the case is what predetermines the context of the Greek reactions, since there will be presence and display of a flag during the entire trip of “Oruc Reis”, but a military escalation is not foreseen, according to the information , will only be allowed if the only demarcated area is violated, that of territorial waters, which for reasons known to all Greek governments since 1994, when the Convention on the Law of the Sea was ratified, has been maintained at 6 the afternoon.

And yet it is hypocritical to listen today to criticism at least from SYRIZA and to promote the expansion of territorial waters as a solution, when Nikos Kotzias’s proposal in much better conditions for the expansion of territorial waters, even in the Ionian, entered the platform after his removal from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs due to Turkish interventions.

The Map of Seville

A dominant invention in the Turkish argument is the demand that Athens renounce the Charter of Seville, a map that Greece has never used as an official document and that only informally at the initiative of a professor at the University of the Spanish city records the maximum range. of ZEE that can to be claimed by the European states.

But Turkey insists on this, since it considers that only the appearance of the map convinces the international factor about the absurdity of Greece’s “maximalist” claims and at the same time wants Athens to distance itself from this map to resign before even sitting on a negotiation table of all the rights offered by the Law of the Sea, which, although not fully attributed, can still be on the table as a strong bargaining chip.

Turkey has been tempted to follow the tactics it has adopted in Syria, that is, “I go in, I extend my hand, I believe perfectly and then I speak.” And it seeks to normalize its unilateral actions, as it has done with Cyprus, and to have – when the time comes – a humiliated Greece at the dialogue table, which will look more like a capitulation negotiation.