EU Commissioner Johansson is now putting money cuts on the table," Spiegel reports. Recent revelations by the magazine give a new dimension to the refugee issue: the exploitation of refugees by the Greek police in the procedures for returning other refugees. "Violent and illegal deportations of migrants must stop now," Ilva Johansson, EU Commissioner for Home Affairs, said via twitter. As the publication points out, according to Johansson, "the disbursement of European funds for migration and border protection should also be linked to the proper implementation of fundamental rights in the EU."
According to Spiegel, "under European law, Greece should make it easier for those arriving on Greek territory to seek asylum. In April, the Council of Europe denounced a significant increase in illegal returns of asylum seekers to European countries."
Greek-Turkish: From Lausanne to today
A lengthy report on the complex past and the difficult present of Greek-Turkish relations focuses on the complex past and the difficult present of Greek-Turkish relations, entitled "What lies behind the dispute over the Aegean islands", by Rhodothea Seralidou and Suzanne Gysten. Among other things it notes: "In 1996, war almost broke out between the two NATO countries over an uninhabited rocky islet. But today much more is at stake: the Greek islands of Lesbos, Chios, Samos and Ikaria off the western coast of Turkey, as well as the Dodecanese, which belong to Greece, with the largest island being Rhodes. Turkey accuses Greece of violating the terms under which it received these islands after the two World Wars, thus challenging Greek sovereignty in the region." The report thoroughly quotes Turkey's claims, which cites the Lausanne (1923) and Paris (1947) treaties on the demilitarization of the islands, as well as the firm Greek positions and the letter it recently sent to the UN.
The report also notes that "Turkey has long since abandoned the level of dispute concerning maritime zones." Indeed, even in this regard it points out that "an agreement but also an appeal to justice requires good bilateral relations and negotiations, which is not the case with Greece and Turkey." Turkey has now moved on to another level: challenging Greece's national sovereignty over islands such as Rhodes, Kos, Lesvos and Chios.
As to the also crucial question of whether the Turkish demand for the demilitarization of the islands is linked to the issue of Greek territorial sovereignty over them, Nele Mats Luc, Professor of International Law at the University of Kiel, gives an answer - among other experts speaking to DLF: "I don't see a connection between the two issues, that one is a precondition of the other, but they are two different legal situations: that is, on the one hand we have the cession of the islands to Greece and on the other the requirement of demilitarization, something Greece may have violated. This would constitute a breach of the Convention, but not in such a way that the cession of the islands by Italy to Greece would become retroactively invalid.""
The F-35 changes the terms of the game though...
An extensive report in the financial daily Handelsblatt by its Athens correspondent Gerd Heller on Greece's request to the US regarding the purchase of the state-of-the-art F-35 fighter jets.
"The F-35 is considered a gamechanger, i.e. it changes the terms of the game."[/B]
"The F-35 is considered a gamechanger. With these fighters, which are difficult to detect by enemy radar, Greece would have supremacy over the Aegean. Turkey has nothing to oppose them. The US had stopped delivery of a hundred F-35s ordered by the Turkish air force when Erdogan ordered S-400 anti-aircraft missiles from Russia. There are fears in Washington that Russia could use missile systems stationed in Turkey."
But as Handelsblatt observes elsewhere, "For over-indebted Greece, arms competition with Turkey is a feat. The unit price of the fighters is $80 million. Including the required weapons systems and related infrastructure, the first 20 fighters will cost about 3.8 billion euros, according to military experts' estimates."
Greece, the paper writes, "joined NATO in 1952 and has spent a lot of money in the past decades on national defense. This was due to its geographical position as a beachhead during the Cold War. After the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in the summer of 1974, the sense of threat from its NATO partner Turkey increasingly became the focus of Greek security policy.
Source: Deutsche Welle
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