On Oct. 14, Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan came to Bursa on his first official visit to attend the World Cup soccer match between Turkey and Armenia and had talks with President Abdullah Gül and Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu.
These events surely mark the turning of a page in the history of relations between the two peoples, full of both amity and animosity. It is hoped that steps toward normalization between Turkey and Armenia will also help trigger steps toward normalization between Azerbaijan and Armenia, leading to peace and stability in the entire South Caucasus.
A High Level Strategic Cooperation Council Agreement signed between Turkey and Syria on Sept. 16 which lifted visa requirement between the two countries came into force on Oct. 13. The foreign ministers of the two countries walked across the border together, in a symbolic gesture showing how far Turkish-Syrian rapprochement has come since 1998, when Turkey threatened military intervention unless Syria ceased harboring Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), pursuing an armed insurgency against Turkey. A day earlier Ankara announced the postponement of a joint air force exercise conducted since 2001 with the participation of warplanes from several NATO countries and Israel, sending a strong signal to Tel Aviv that it is ready to review its alliance if it continues with the policy of “Greater Israel” -- that is, with the occupation and suppression of the Palestinian people.
Earlier, on Oct. 9, George Papandreou, the newly elected prime minister of Greece, as early as his fifth day in office, prior to his scheduled visit to Greek Cyprus on Oct. 19, flew to İstanbul and had talks with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, raising hopes of possible new initiatives between Turkey and Greece to broaden their rapprochement, which started 10 years ago when the Greek government decided to alter its policy from stiff opposition to conditional support for Turkish accession to the European Union.
The Cyprus Mail, an English-language daily published in Nicosia, in an article titled “Panic grips ‘never’ land,” described the reaction of hard-line nationalists on the Greek side of the island to Papandreou’s Turkey visit as follows: “The election of this liberal and gentle man has spread fear and panic on the island of love, where a section of the population view him as a Turk-loving, US-worshipping, champion of the A-plan, who will push for the speedy closure of the Cyprob. Friday’s visit to Turkey, where he met [with] Prime Minister Erdoğan and his foreign minister, confirmed the worst nightmares of the island’s hard-liners and ‘never’ campaigners, because they realised that good relations with the savage Turks would be a priority of Giorgakis’ foreign policy.” (Oct. 11)
While Papandreou was in İstanbul, I flew to Athens to participate in a journalists’ meeting on Cyprus, organized twice a year for the last 10 years by Germany’s Friedrich Ebert Foundation, bringing together colleagues from the four sides of the problem. Greek colleagues I contacted during the visit confirmed the expectation that the Papandreou government may be much more favorable toward finding solutions to bilateral disputes with Turkey and to the Cyprus problem. In this context, the fact that the key ministers in the new cabinet, including Papandreou himself, were in favor of the UN-brokered Annan plan for a comprehensive solution to the Cyprus problem, which was supported by Turkish Cypriots but overwhelmingly rejected by the Greek Cypriots in referendums held in April 2004, was highlighted.
Greek colleagues unanimously expressed how Turkish warplane flights over inhabited Greek islands in the Aegean have created a most adverse climate of opinion in Greece toward rapprochement with Turkey. Some of them raised the question as to why Turkey fails to reciprocate the good will shown by Greece, which has since 1999 been supporting Turkish accession to the EU, and avoids steps to solve problems between the two countries. They even questioned if the Erdoğan government had a truly new foreign policy of “zero problems with neighbors” in view of, according to their understanding, nothing new in the Turco-Greek relationship. My response was briefly as follows:
The Erdoğan government has surely delivered substantially with respect to Turco-Greek rapprochement, in the context of EU accession perspective which opened up in 1999 and remained credible until the end of 2005. Despite stiff opposition from rival parties, Rauf Denktaş (a hard-line nationalist former president of northern Cyprus), and military commanders who conspired to topple it, the Erdoğan government gave its approval to the Annan plan, which was supported by the EU and the US. The Greek Cypriots, however, rejected the plan (which would have brought to an end the presence of 40,000 Turkish troops on the island), joined the EU soon thereafter and apparently became even less interested in a solution, making the Cyprus problem one of the main stumbling blocks to Turkey’s EU bid.
The Erdoğan government has delivered also in the context of strictly bilateral relations with Greece. Since 2002 there have been 41 rounds of secret exploratory talks between the two governments for the settlement of Aegean disputes. There were unconfirmed reports in 2007 that the governments came close to agreement on how to go about resolving their differences. The fact that these talks have been continuing surely is in itself a positive development.
Despite the fact that the Aegean disputes and the Cyprus problem remain unresolved, there has been significant improvement in bilateral relations since 1999. The volume of trade between the two countries has grown fivefold, increasing from about $700 million in 1999 to $3.6 billion in 2008. In 2006, the National Bank of Greece acquired Finansbank in the largest financial transaction ever made between Turkey and Greece. The Greek Alpha and EFG banks each acquired Turkish banks the same year. Civil society dialogue and relations have continued to grow. The number of Greek citizens visiting Turkey nearly quadrupled, increasing from about 145,000 in 1999 to 570,000 in 2008. Relations between the two countries have on the whole improved to such an extent that war between them has become unthinkable, quite unlike the situation in the mid 1990s. A recently published book on Turco-Greek relations, titled “In the Long Shadow of Europe: Greeks and Turks in the Era of Postnationalism” (Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2009), provides a comprehensive account of what has and has not changed in the relationship in the last 10 years.
It is, therefore, a highly unfair judgment to say that the Erdoğan government has not helped promote better and peaceful relations between the two countries. This does not, of course, mean that there is no room for further improvement. I recently wrote a column for the Zaman daily, titled “Time for ‘zero-problems’ with neighbor Greece” (Oct. 15), calling on the Erdoğan government to suspend warplane flights over inhabited Greek islands (which rightly causes concern in Greek public opinion), to open the Heybeliada Halki Greek Orthodox seminary, closed since 1971, and even to consider withdrawing a part of Turkish troops on Cyprus with a view to supporting ongoing negotiations between presidents Mehmet Ali Talat and Dimitris Christofias to reach a comprehensive solution.
I recently had the privilege of having dinner with Professor Johan Galtung, the distinguished Norwegian sociologist and the founder of the discipline of peace and conflict resolution studies. I posed to him the question as to whether the Erdoğan government was adopting a risky strategy of trying to deal with multiple domestic and foreign policy problems all at once, attempting mainly in this context to bring the Kurdish problem at home to a peaceful solution while simultaneously taking initiatives to normalize relations with neighboring Armenia. He said he was not at all of that opinion and commented that these initiatives were “getting Turkey unstuck…”
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