Turkish provocations have reached new levels in recent days. After the direct threats of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Mevlut Cavusoglu against the Greece and the islands of the Aegean Sea, a series of pro-government media followed with a crescendo of threats and warnings to Greece.
Unbelievable things were said during a discussion on CNN Turk about the Greek-Turkish relations and the tension between the two countries.
Journalist Zafer Sahin, referring to the infamous “EGAYDAAK” list, spoke of 152 islands and islets that -according to him- have not been defined by International Agreements and that in the future Turkey may…occupy them with military means.
In the CNN Turk studio, however, was the chairman of the “Homeland” party Muarem Ince, who reacted strongly to Sahin’s position, commenting that: “Turkey has no ambitions for anyone’s islands” to receive the cynical answer from the journalist: “Maybe we’ll take them, who knows?”
Ince also reacted strongly to Sahin’s claims that the Lausanne Treaty could be “updated” in favor of Turkey. In the statement of the president of the “Homeland” party that the current conditions were signed 150-100 years ago, Sahin spoke provocatively about the alleged 152 islands and islets whose “sovereignty has not been determined”, according to international law, citing the “EGAYDAAK” list.
Turkey’s narrative of “disputed” islands and islets in the Aegean Sea, is codified in the term “EGAYDAAK”, an acronym for “Egemenligi Anlasmalarla Yunanistan’a Devredilmemis Ada Adacιkve Kayalιklar” (translated: “Islands and Islets whose Ownership was not Transferred to Greece by International Agreements and Treaties“).
According to what has become known, this list includes 152 islands and islets of the Aegean and Cretan Seas, which Turkey wants back in the context of the neo-Ottoman aspirations of the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
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The theory of the “gray zones” in the Aegean Sea was first proposed after 1996 and the crisis in the Imia islets, when Turkey, through a diplomatic statement to Greece, spoke directly about an unspecified number of islands, for which, allegedly, there is “no clear legal status”.
A year earlier (8/6/1995) the famous “Casus Belli”(trnslt. Cause for War) official threat had preceded, in case Greece proceeded to extend its territorial waters to 12 nautical miles, as it has the right to do according to the 1982 International Convention on the Law of the Sea. Ankara’s next move was to fully record their claims, codifying the disputed areas in the infamous “EGAYDAAK” list. The “EGAYDAAK” list has been included in the textbooks of the Turkish War Academy and since then it has been essentially a dogma of Turkish foreign policy.
It is worth noting that the so-called by Turkey “gray zones” of the Aegean Sea and the Turkish argument around them, were set by Kemalist – secular Turkish governments with the “green light” of the military leadership that was powerful in the 1990s.
Turkey falsely claims that in the Lausanne Treaty (1923) ratifying Greek sovereignty over the eastern Aegean islands, which had been liberated during the First Balkan War of 1912-1913, as well as in the Paris Peace Agreement (1947), with which the defeated Italy gave Greece the Dodecanese, there are islands and islets with a disputed status since they are not mentioned by name in these documents. The Turkish allegations, however, are rejected by the very Treaties, which in recent years President Tayyip Erdogan has directly raised the issue of revising.
