Solana pushes, Church pulls
As European foreign policy chief Javier Solana stepped up pressure on Athens to drop its objections to an EU-NATO deal that could give Turkey a crucial say in military operations in the Aegean and Cyprus, the government yesterday received strong backing from an unexpected quarter. The leader of the Church of Greece, embroiled in a two-year-old feud with the ruling Socialists over the content of state identity cards, said Athens was quite right to resist sanctioning a potentially suicidal agreement. Under a US-brokered deal understood to be backed by all EU members but Greece, a new defence pact between the EU and NATO would allow Turkey a say in the deployment of European military forces in its immediate neighborhood. Athens feels that this would leave it defenseless in the event of a clash with Turkey in the Aegean or Cyprus. «I want to praise both the government and the opposition for resisting,» Archbishop Christodoulos told a congregation in the central Greek town of Lamia. “Good for them. If we accede, it will be as if we have signed our own death warrant. The Turks will reach as far as Larissa and Lamia.» The deeply eurosceptic church leader said EU and NATO officials were «hypocrites.» «They want our signature, and when some problem arises they will leave us on our own again, as was the case in Cyprus and is now in Palestine,» Christodoulos said. In an interview published in yesterday’s Sunday Vima newspaper, Solana warned that failure to reach a swift deal would put paid to a possible EU peacekeeping mission to replace NATO forces in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. «We are trying to achieve a permanent settlement between the EU and NATO,» he said. «Whoever does not allow us to reach such a settlement will bear responsibility for the EU’s inability to carry out the mission [in FYROM].» Solana added that «a functional agreement between the EU and NATO must be achieved as soon as possible… Negotiations will be difficult, but I think they will bear fruit.»
