by Yigal Schleifer |
Eurasianet.org
Last
week's visit to Turkey by
Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras certainly hit all the right positive
notes. Dozens of bilateral agreements were signed by the two countries and
Samaras and his Turkish counterpart both vowed to increase trade between Turkey
and Greece and to work together to solve the Cyprus problem.
The
two once-bickering neighbors have certainly come a long way from decades past,
when a visit like Samaras's to Turkey -- now something fairly routine -- would
have been hailed as a major breakthrough. That said, it appears that some
trouble might be in store for Turkey-Greece relations, particularly regarding
the issue of Athens' desire to lay claim to a vast amount of potentially oil-
and gas-rich maritime territory in the eastern Mediterranean. From a recent
Wall Street Journal report that
came out only days after Samaras left Turkey:
Greece has renewed its
territorial claims over a broad swath of disputed waters in the eastern
Mediterranean where the indebted country hopes to find vast oil and gas
deposits—a plan that risks sparking a confrontation with Turkey.
Over the past several weeks,
senior government officials have made a series of public statements—both at
home and abroad—pointing to an almost two-decade-old international treaty
granting those rights, one Greece hasn't asserted until now. Athens also has
been building support in other European capitals and stepping up a diplomatic
campaign at the United Nations….
….For Greece, the stakes are enormous. An estimated €100 billion ($130 billion) of undersea hydrocarbon reserves—if proven—could ease the country's crippling debt burden and make Greece a significant energy supplier for Europe, which wants to reduce its dependence on Russia. Mounting evidence of those reserves, along with recent moves by Cyprus to assert its own claims, have raised the stakes even further.
Those reserves "will mean,
clearly, wealth for Greece, wealth for Europe, a significant improvement in
Europe's energy security and a significant enhancement in Greece's geopolitical
role," Mr. Samaras said in a recent speech to a business conference.
For now, Greece is proceeding
cautiously to avoid confrontation and is using U.N. procedures to gradually
build its case. Athens's end goal is clear: Greece hopes to gain international
recognition for the exclusive use of a 200-nautical-mile zone around the
country, basing its claims on the fact that it is a signatory to the U.N.'s Law
of the Sea treaty and Turkey isn't.
The
big question here is just how expansively Greece want to interpret its international
right to claim its maritime territorial boundaries. According to the United
Nations' Convention on the Law of the Sea, which Athens has signed but Ankara
has not, Greece can claim territorial rights extending 12 miles from land, as
well as an "exclusive economic zone" (EEZ) of 200 miles. Since Greece
has islands sprinkled throughout the Aegean and well into the eastern
Mediterranean, the country could technically lay claim to an extremely broad
area by extending its EEZ and territorial rights from the shores of these
far-flung islands.
Turkey
is already involved in a similar dispute with Greek
Cyprus, which claims an EEZ that Ankara says infringes on its own
maritime territory. That disagreement has already led to some very bellicose
language from Turkish officials and, at one point, the dispatching of Turkish
naval vessels to patrol a part of the Mediterranean where the Greek Cypriots
were drilling for gas.
So
far, the question of Greece's maritime territorial ambitions has been received
by Ankara with more diplomatic language. In an interview the
other day with the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu said that despite the differences of opinion regarding Greece's
territorial claims, Ankara considers the Aegean as a "sea of dialogue and
friendship." As Greece ramps up in the coming months and years its effort
to lay claim to wider swath of the Aegean, keeping up that dialogue and
friendship will likely prove to be extremely challenging.
Source: http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66680
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