Turkish opposition joins escalation game
Extreme rhetoric from across the political spectrum in the wake of Macron backing the Greek PM
Turkish political leaders were bidding to outdo each other on Tuesday in the use of aggressive rhetoric targeting Greece.
Apart from the members of the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, extreme voices of other representatives of the political spectrum are becoming more and more frequent. Indicative was the statement on Tuesday by Kemal Kilicdaroglu, chairman of the Republican People’s Party, who repeated his exhortations to Erdogan to follow the example of Turkish leader Bulent Ecevit, who ordered the invasion of Cyprus in 1974, and to take action not just talk, urging him to stop threatening that Turkey “will come one night.”
Moreover, Erdogan’s former close associate and chairman of the Development and Progress Party, Ali Babacan, claimed that Greece has taken “many steps that violate our sovereign rights.”
Turkey’s National Assembly Speaker Mustafa Sentop also joined the escalation game on Tuesday, saying it is “unacceptable” that Greece wants to turn the Aegean Sea “into a Greek lake.” He added that “Greece’s rhetoric and actions have turned into a security threat.”
The crescendo came in the wake of the meeting in Paris between French President Emmanuel Macron and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on Monday and their statements on Turkish provocations and the shield provided by the strategic partnership between Greece and France in the Eastern Mediterranean. Government sources underline that the meeting, which lasted more than three hours, along with a dinner, confirmed their common stance and the geopolitical synergy between the two countries.
Apparently referring to the Mitsotakis-Macron meeting, Turkey’s Defense Minister Hulusi Akar claimed that Athens is “trying to exploit and distort every event, to influence third parties with lies and slander and to complain about Turkey to third countries.” He also accused Greece of a “two-faced policy” while also repeating Ankara’s claims that Greece “locked on to” Turkish fighters with S-300s, that Kurdish terrorists are being sheltered in Lavrio, that the Muslim minority of Thrace is ethnic and not religious and that its rights are being violated, that the islands must be demilitarized, and that the boundaries of territorial waters and airspace must coincide.
Echoing the same sentiments, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu accused Greece of slandering Turkey and “becoming a tool of others.” “It is constantly trying to provoke us. And we remind them. You have provoked us in the past. You got your answer and the price was heavy.”
