The dominance of the islands remains in the sights of Ankara

By Costas Raptis

There are official positions, there is also the informal literature. At the official level, Ankara insists on targeting the eastern Aegean islands, according to new statements by Mevlüt Çavuşoλουlu on Tuesday.

“International conditions are clear, but Greece is violating them. It is equipping the islands. If Greece does not stop this violation, the sovereignty of the islands will be called into question,” the Turkish foreign minister said during a joint news conference with his counterpart. from Northern Macedonia.

In fact, the Turkish Foreign Minister attributed to Greek “accusations of Turkish expansion” to an “inferiority complex”, which he reversed, claiming that Athens is becoming aggressive “because it can not respond to the two letters from Turkey” to the UN, which were made last year. for the first time on the table the ideology of the “conditional” return of the islands of the eastern Aegean to Greek sovereignty with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

However, these two letters have been answered with two correspondents of the Greek Permanent Representative to the UN, where it is emphasized that the unilateral objections of the Turkish side are not legal, have clear revisionist motives and further fuel instability.

Whatever the “connection” of the sovereignty of the islands with their demilitarization, it is now at the center of the Turkish argument. And Turkey is not used to not supporting its words with deeds.

Already the planned exit of the fourth Turkish floating drilling rig “Alparslan”, with a crew of 200 people, for research at a depth of 12,200 meters, foretells tensions for the summer. And with the naval directive A1781 / 22, Greece in response commits five areas from June 21 to September 7 for exercises of the Greek Navy and Air Force.

Revisionist visions

These at the official level. Because in the Turkish public debate, the imagination is raging.

In a CNN Türk broadcast on Wednesday night, former Secretary of State Masum Turker, among other things, claimed that “according to the agreements, the establishment of bases is not allowed in Crete” and that the Turkish side tolerated this fact in the past, because it was American fundamentals. This is the same former minister, who in another recent TV appearance argued that “our Navy must take action in those Aegean islands to stop the situation that has developed there.”

Similarly, on Wednesday night, on Haber Türk channel, university professor Naim Babouroglou said that if the terms of the Lausanne Treaty on demilitarization were violated, the eastern Aegean islands should be returned to their former owner, the Democrats. of the Ottoman Empire.

In other words, Turkish public opinion is addicted to overt revisions and visions of imperial grandeur, clad in rhetoric of self-defense against encirclement scenarios.

The attitude of the opposition

However, the problem does not lie only with the rulers – who, it is true, are faced with the question of retaining power, if necessary through abnormal situations, as a year before the scheduled presidential and parliamentary elections their popularity plummets by in a manner directly proportional to the purchasing power of the average Turkish household. Equally or more problematic is the attitude of the opposition, which shows that Turkish revisionism is a structural problem and not a structural one.

It is recalled that it was the People’s Republican Party that inaugurated the literature on “16 islands occupied by Greece”, while its leader Kemal Kilincdaroglu has chosen to exercise opposition on the issue from more uncompromising positions, accusing the government of “reduction .

Looking beyond the Atlantic

“The US has filled Greece with bases. Their goals are clear. Let a proposal come to the parliament to close the US military facilities in Turkey and we will support it,” Kilicdaroglu said recently, while in a written statement he more or less supported the following “Our position is clear. It is imperative that we increase the pressure on the Mediterranean and the Aegean. If you have a heart, take the step to the occupied and equipped islands. We will support it! ”

Although Kilicdaroglu does not need … an interpreter, some things become clearer than the informal discussions. Thus, in a discussion on CNN Türk, political analyst Hakan Bairaktsi urged: “Let us take some islands in the Aegean, let the policy of Greece and the USA collapse”. Respectively, the director of the “Hürriyet” newspaper, Ahmet Hakan, wondered if “Greece is becoming a US state”. He further added that “there is a US plan being implemented through Greece” and referred to Erdogan’s question “who do they want to threaten with so many bases they are building”.

The element, therefore, that functions as a breakthrough in the history of the Greek-Turkish and alarms Ankara is precisely the Greek-American military alliance, which, while from the Aegean is considered as an element of stabilization of the region and shielding the country, in the opposite coast is interpreted as a catalysis of the status quo and preparation for the creation of a “blockade” to the detriment of Turkey.

The West is blackmailed

In short, the new tensions in Greek-Turkish cannot be interpreted in a purely bilateral context, but should be included in the complex context of Turkey-West relations, at a time when the Erdogan regime is haggling over the veto of Sweden and Finland. threatens new military invasion of northern Syria to hit US-sponsored Kurdish zone south of Turkish border, maintains working relations with Moscow “with the Arab states.

This is an attitude based on the notion that the war in Ukraine is rewarding revisionist movements as a whole, making the West blackmailing and, in the long run, less coherent. The latter becomes clear in the field of Euro-Turkish relations, where the substantial cancellation of its neighbor’s accession perspective is accompanied by the building of privileged bilateral relations with individual Member States, such as e.g. Italy, and the effort to “seal” Athens and Nicosia from the acquis of their own European integration.