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Turkey and Greece, both members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), have been embroiled in a dispute that is among the most intense among them for months over the energy resources of the eastern Mediterranean, but this is not the first time intensifies the tension between the two neighboring countries.
The following is an overview of some of the points of tension and conflict between the two neighboring countries:
Cyprus
Cyprus is a small island that has historically been disputed over its identity and subordination between Turkey and Greece. On its territory, a political struggle is waged between the two main components of the island’s inhabitants, the Greek Cypriots and the Cypriots of Turkish descent.
The Cyprus issue is one of the oldest issues before the United Nations and one of the most important issues in the historical conflicts between Turkey and Greece. The Mediterranean island was divided in 1974 when the then Turkish Prime Minister, Bulent Ecevit, ordered the army to intervene militarily in Cyprus, in response to a coup against the elected President Makarios by Greek Cypriot nationalists on the orders of Athens with the aim of annex it to Greece.
The island of Cyprus is currently made up of two independent states, one of which is recognized and a member of the United Nations and the European Union, which is the Republic of Cyprus and its capital is Nicosia and is based on 65% of the area of the island, and the second is independent but not recognized except by Turkey and is called the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus” and is set at 35%. From the rest of the island and its capital, Lefkosha.
The United Nations peacekeeping force in Cyprus, which is among the oldest UN peacekeepers, patrols along the “green line” that separates the two halves.
Turkey states that it is ready to negotiate with any country, including Greece, with the exception of the Republic of Cyprus, which it does not recognize.
border
The conflict over Cyprus was broadened to encompass a number of other issues, including rights to the disputed bodies of water, as well as to airspace.
Greece insists that international law gives it the right to expand its marine areas to 12 nautical miles in exchange for the six nautical miles it now enjoys, but Turkey fears that this could deny it access to the continental shelf in the Aegean and oil and natural gas.
The Aegean is characterized by a complex geography with a network of more than two thousand islands, most of them Greek.
The two countries were almost involved in a war in the 1990s over the two islands of “Imia” known as “Kardak”, which are uninhabited, but these differences were brushed aside by what was called “earthquake diplomacy” in 1999, when Greece responded to a devastating earthquake that shook Turkey.
Immigrants
The Syrian war has caused an influx of refugees, especially to Turkey, which is a transit point for many seeking to reach rich countries in the European Union. Turkey is currently host to some 4 million refugees, most of them Syrian, and more than a million refugees arrived in the European Union in 2015.
A year later, Ankara signed a landmark agreement with the European Union that provides for an end to the flow of migrants in exchange for incentives, including financial aid.
And last February, Turkey allowed refugees to cross into Greece, resulting in border skirmishes.
Churches
The disagreement over the handling of the Byzantine legacy in Turkey once again highlighted the historical divide between the two countries.
Anxiety deepened after Turkey reconverted Hagia Sophia into a mosque last month after it had been a museum since the 1930s as part of the Turkish Republic’s efforts to adopt a more secular path.
Greece condemned Ankara’s decision to reopen the site, which is listed on the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage List, as a mosque, in a move that the Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis considered revealing Turkey’s “weakness”, but Ankara considers the return of Hagia Sophia to be an internal matter that has no rights. So that any external part interferes with it.
Minorities
Turkey accuses Greece of failing to respect the rights of members of the Muslim minority in the western Thrace region of central Greece, including their right to education.
Erdogan has always accused Greece of mistreating Muslim and Turkish-speaking minorities on its soil, noting that Athens is the only European capital that does not host an official mosque.
At the same time, Athens is pressing Turkey to open a school for Orthodox clergy on an island off Istanbul, and Ankara does not recognize the powers of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul.
The failed coup
The flight of Turkish soldiers after the 2016 coup attempt against the Erdogan government became another source of tension between the two sides.
In 2017, a Greek court rejected Turkey’s demands to hand over 8 former Turkish army officers.
The eight fled to Greece aboard a military helicopter on the night of the failed coup, which Ankara accuses of plotting the American preacher Fethullah Gulen.
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