Officials from Greece and Turkey met in Athens on Monday as part of a long-standing effort to improve strained relations between the two neighbours, after Turkey raised objections to Greek plans to create marine reserves in the Ionian and Aegean seas, AP News reports.
The two states are NATO allies but have feuded for decades over a range of issues, including territorial claims in the Aegean and drilling rights in the Mediterranean, and have come to the brink of war three times in the past 50 years. A dispute over energy exploration rights in 2020 led to warships from the two countries clashing in the Mediterranean Sea.
The Athens meeting was to discuss confidence-building measures after a similar meeting in Ankara last November. The two countries have periodically engaged in a confidence-building process over the years, trying to find common ground on a number of less significant issues as a means of improving relations.
The meeting comes ahead of May talks in Ankara between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
Tense relations have improved significantly over the past year, with Erdogan visiting Athens in December and signing a number of trade, energy and education agreements.
However, Mitsotakis’ announcement last week that Greece would establish two marine parks to protect marine mammals and birds – one in the Ionian Sea in western Greece and one in the central Aegean – angered Turkey.
Omer Celik, a spokesman for Erdogan’s ruling party, said last week that Ankara considered the creation of the marine parks “a step that sabotages the normalisation process” of relations, and said Turkey would “in no way allow the action of declaring marine parks in the Aegean Sea”.
Mitsotakis, speaking last week after a meeting of European leaders in Brussels, expressed surprise at what he called Turkey’s “totally unjustified reaction to an initiative that is, after all, environmental in nature.”
The Greek prime minister said the recent improvement in relations between Greece and Turkey was “undeniable and measurable”, but it did not mean that Turkey had changed its positions on the delimitation of maritime zones in the Aegean Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. Mitsotakis said:
“These positions remain positions which are deeply problematic for our country. But this does not prevent us from being able to talk, to create a general good climate and invest more in a positive agenda and less in the issues which divide us and over which we clearly disagree.”
The Greek delegation to the talks was led by Ambassador Theocharis Lalakos, while the Turkish delegation was led by Deputy Foreign Minister Burak Akcapar, the Greek defence ministry said.
