Türkiye and the regional politics

after the Cold War: Greece,

Cyprus and the Balkans
Source: William Hale, Turkish
Foreign Policy since 1774, (3rd
edition), 2013, New York: Routledge.
Türkiye, Greece and Cyprus

• Following his election as President of Cyprus in

February 1988, George Vassiliou restarted
negotiations with Rauf Denktaş, the Turkish
Cypriot leader, in 1990.
• These failed to get off the ground since Denktaş
insisted that as a precondition both sides should
be recognized as having ‘sovereign status’. With
the two sides unable to agree even on basic
principles, the 1990 talks got nowhere.
• In spite of long discussions in 1992, the talks became deadlocked
over the territorial division between Greeks and Turks in a future
federation, and the right of the Greek Cypriot refugees to return
to their former homes in the north.
• Prospects for a constitutional settlement dimmed further in July
1994, when the European Court of Justice effectively banned
Turkish Cypriot exports to the EU.
• This prompted the National Assembly of the Turkish Republic of
Northern Cyprus (TRNC) to delete the reference to the possibility
of a future confederation with the Greeks from the TRNC
constitution and reject the idea of further talks on the confidence-
building measures while the judgment was in force.
Problems with Greece and Southern Cyprus

• In the late 1990s, the Cyprus dispute became further complicated by

the problems between Greece and Türkiye and Türkiye’s worsening
relations with the EU.
• In January 1996, a bizarre ‘battle of the flags’ broke out between
Greece and Türkiye following a maritime accident on the
uninhabited rocky outcrop of Kardak (Imia in Greek), which lies
just under four nautical miles off Türkiye’s Aegean coast, and 5.5
miles from the Greek island of Kalymnos.
• Fortunately, the risk of a direct armed clash between Greece and
Türkiye was avoided by rapid intervention by the American
mediator Richard Holbrooke. However, attempts to widen this into a
broader agreement over territorial rights in the Aegean failed to
make progress.
• A year later, in January 1997, tensions rose once more when
the Clerides government announced that it had ordered a
total of 48 S-300 air defence missiles from Russia, which
would be able to hit targets on the Turkish mainland as well
as in Cypriot airspace.
• This was treated as a provocative challenge by Tansu Çiller,
then the foreign minister, who threatened that the Turkish
air force would destroy the missiles if they were installed.
• Fortunately, in December 1998, Clerides was persuaded to
back down under intense pressure from Washington.
• In June 1997, the installation of the coalition led by Mesut
Yιlmaz meant that there was now a government in Ankara
prepared to mend its fences with the western powers and hence
with Greece.
• At a NATO meeting in Madrid in July 1997, the Greek and
Turkish governments expressed a commitment to peaceful
relations, respect for each other’s sovereignty and existing
international treaties.
• This was accompanied by renewed talks between Denktaş and
Clerides under UN auspices, first in Troutbeck, New York, in
July 1997, and then in Glion, Switzerland, in August.
• Neither of these encounters resulted in any progress,
mainly because Denktaş objected to the expected opening
of accession negotiations between Cyprus and the EU
without any Turkish Cypriot representation.
• Any short-run chances of a meaningful dialogue with
Greece, or progress on the Cyprus issue, were further
reduced by the decision of the EU’s Luxembourg summit
in December 1997, which confirmed Türkiye’s apparent
exclusion from the enlargement process.
• It was not until 1999 that more hopeful prospects
began to emerge. The Greek government’s murky
role in the Öcalan affair, made clear after his
capture by the Turks in Nairobi in February 1999
produced a change of heart by Greece in its
attitude to Türkiye.
• In May 1999, the new Greek foreign minister
George Papandreou took up an offer made by his
Turkish opposite number, İsmail Cem, for a
dialogue on bilateral issues between the two
countries.
Improvement in relations

• The agenda was mainly limited to uncontroversial questions –

such as trade, tourism and environmental protection – but
included ‘cooperation against terrorism’ (a reference to the
Turkish demand for a definite end to Greek support for the PKK).
• Controversial issues, such as seabed rights and territorial waters
in the Aegean, were postponed until a later date.
• The Turkish earthquake of 17 August 1999, to which the Greek
people and government responded rapidly and generously, and
the despatch of a Turkish aid team to help with rescue operations
after an earthquake in Athens on 7 September, led to a dramatic
reversal of hostile attitudes in the press, even if public opinion
seemed to be slow to catch up with this.
• Of the various substantive obstacles to be overcome,
Cyprus was still the most intractable.
• In November 1999, Rauf Denktaş, who was evidently
under strong pressure from the US and the UN on this
point, agreed to join Clerides in proximity talks in New
York under UN auspices.
• These failed to produce effective results, since Denktaş
pressed for a ‘confederation’, or a looser form of reunion
than the ‘federation’ demanded by the Greeks, who feared
that the ‘confederal’ formula might give the Turkish
Cypriots the right to opt out of a future Cypriot state.
• While Türkiye did not reject the principle of Cypriot accession (to the EU),
it had insisted that this could not precede an internal settlement and should
be simultaneous with the accession of Türkiye.
• On balance, however, Ecevit’s government could not afford to turn down
the possibility of eventual accession and had to accept the Helsinki terms.
• On the positive side, the Helsinki decisions gave a positive boost to the
developing rapprochement between the mainland governments of Greece
and Türkiye. In January 2000, George Papandreou visited Ankara to sign
agreements to encourage mutual investments and prevent double taxation,
besides cooperation in fighting organized crime, preventing illegal
immigration, promoting tourism and protecting the environment. It was
reciprocated by İsmail Cem, who visited Athens on 3 February 2000. This
produced five further agreements on non-contentious issues, such as
cultural and economic cooperation.
• However, it also left the most thorny questions in
Greek–Turkish relations, in particular the longstanding
disputes over offshore mineral rights and territorial waters in
the Aegean, still unsettled. As the decisions of the Helsinki
summit had made clear, Türkiye would not be able to conclude
accession negotiations with the EU, unless they were solved.
• Further discussions between Cem and Papandreou continued
over the next two years, and by April 2002, the harmony
between them was so far advanced that they even agreed to
carry out a joint mission to Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat in
the hope of helping to defuse the Israeli–Palestinian crisis.
The Annan Plan

• The Annan Plan envisaged the establishment of a bi-zonal

federation, to be known as the United Cyprus Republic, with
weak federal powers, and a single shared sovereignty prohibiting
both partition and union with any other country.
• The Treaty of Guarantee provided by the 1960 agreements would
remain in force. There would be a bi-cameral federal legislature
including of a Chamber of Deputies of 48 members with
representation of each community in accordance with its share of
the population and a minimum of 12 Turkish Cypriot deputies.
• In the upper house, or Senate, there would again be 48 members,
but with equal numbers of Greek and Turkish Cypriot
representatives.
• The federal government, referred to as the Presidential Council,
would have six voting and three non-voting members, with
members drawn proportionately from each community. This
would elect a President and Vice-President, one from each
community, who would rotate in office every 20 months.
• In a territorial adjustment, the Turkish Cypriot territory would be
reduced to 28 per cent of the island and there would be a
timetable for the withdrawal of foreign troops, to leave 950
Greek and 750 Turkish soldiers.
• Freedom of settlement and freedom of property ownership
between the two constituent states would be restricted for a
defined period, or until Türkiye became a full member of the EU.
• When it took office in November 2002, the AKP government gave full
support to the Annan plan and it was hoped that agreement to proceed on
this basis could be reached in time for the Copenhagen meeting of the
European Council in December.
• However, Rauf Denktaş blocked this effort. The Turkish military, in the
person of the Commander of Land Forces, General Aytaç Yalman, gave
him public support. This turned out to be a fatal mistake, since President
Clerides would probably have accepted the plan whereas his successor,
Tassos Papdopoulos, who was elected to the Greek Cypriot presidency in
February 2003, opposed it. In this way, the brief window of opportunity to
settle the problem was missed.
• The need to reach an agreement was underlined by the decision of the
European Council meeting in Copenhagen, confirming the previous
Helsinki decision, to the effect that the Republic of Cyprus could be
admitted to the EU on 1 May 2004 even if there were no previous internal
settlement.
• In December 2003, events appeared to take a more hopeful turn
when Rauf Denktaş’s party lost control of the TRNC parliament.
The following month, Mehmet Ali Talat, leader of the opposition
Republican Turkish Party, which favoured a settlement, took office
as Prime Minister with Rauf Denktaş’s son Serdar, who had broken
with his father, as deputy premier and foreign minister.
• The new Turkish Cypriot government committed itself to reaching
an agreement with the Greek Cypriots by 1 May 2004, in
cooperation with Türkiye.
• Soon afterwards, on 23 January 2004, at a meeting of the National
Security Council in Ankara, objections from the Chief of the
General Staff, General Hilmi Özkök, as well as from President
Ahmet Necdet Sezer were overruled, and it was agreed that the
Annan plan should be supported.
• In the run-up to the referendums, it became clear that the majority of
Turkish Cypriots favoured the Annan plan, since if it were implemented
then they would join the European Union as equal partners of the Greek
Cypriots and their international isolation would be ended. Hence, it was
no surprise that just under 65 per cent of Turkish Cypriot voters
approved of the plan, with a turnout rate of 87 per cent.
• The same reasoning did not apply on the Greek Cypriot side, since the
Republic of Cyprus would be admitted to the EU on 1 May anyway,
without having to make any constitutional concessions.
• The Greek Cypriots responded by rejecting the plan by 76 to 24 per
cent, in an 89 per cent turnout. Hence, the Annan plan was killed, and
the Republic of Cyprus entered the European Union on 1 May 2004 as
a purely Greek state, creating serious problems for the EU as well as
Türkiye and the Turkish Cypriots.
• Immediately after the referendums, the European Council issued a
statement declaring that ‘the Council is determined to put an end to the
isolation of the Turkish Cypriot community and to facilitate the
reunification of Cyprus’, but did virtually nothing to put these words into
effect.
• Between 2006 and early 2008, Mehmet Ali Talat and Tassos Papadopoulos
had more than 50 meetings, although these proved quite fruitless. In
February 2008, events took a turn for the better when Papadopoulos was
unexpectedly defeated in the Greek Cypriot presidential elections, to be
succeeded by Demetris Christofias, leader of the nominally communist
‘Progressive Party of the Working People’ (AKEL).
• Hopes were raised by the fact that since both he and Talat enjoyed a long-
established dialogue, as leaders of left-wing parties that opposed ethnic
nationalism, they might be able to overcome the differences between the
two sides. However, after early successes, the talks became bogged down
over some basic principles.
• On the face of it, the story of links between the two mainland
governments after 2002 was less depressing. The fact that Greece
now supported the principle of Turkish accession to the EU, rather
than opposing it as it had formerly, had obviously positive effects on
Turkish attitudes. Rapprochement with Greece fitted well into
Ahmet Davutoğlu’s policy of ‘zero problems with neighbours’ (even
if this had signally failed in the Cypriot case).
• Contacts between the two countries continued to develop, most
notably with the visit of Costas Karamanlis to Ankara in January
2008 – the first visit by a Greek Premier to Türkiye for 49 years. In
a return trip to Athens in May 2010, Tayyip Erdoğan initiated a
High Level Cooperation Council aiming to bring ministers from the
two countries into regular consultations, so as to institutionalize
their cooperation – a strategy that was extended to other countries.
Economic Relations
• Commercial and economic relations with Greece have also gained
momentum since 1999. In the economic sphere, there was a huge increase
in bilateral trade, which rose in value from $903 million in 2002 to just
under $3 billion in 2010, and the opening of a pipeline to supply natural
gas from Türkiye to Greece in November 2007.
• The establishment of the HLCC mechanism in 2010 in particular has paved
the way for a substantial increase in commercial relations. The bilateral
trade volume thus doubled between 2010 and 2014, reaching 5.6 billion
USD by the end of 2014. Although the bilateral trade volume decreased in
2015 and 2016, it gained momentum in 2017 (3.5 billion USD) and
amounted to 4.18 billion USD in 2018
• There were also signs that the relationship was developing into a people-
to-people rapprochement, rather than a purely governmental one, with
proliferating cultural exchanges, business group contacts and youth
exchanges, in which the EU was active in funding activities by civil society
groups.
• A crucial role was also played by the Ecumenical
Patriarch Bartholomew I in his outspoken
advocacy of Greek– Turkish reconciliation, in
opposition to the outrightly racialist views of
Archbishop Christodoulos, formerly head of the
Church of Greece.
• In diplomatic relations, a significant sign of the
improvement was seen in April 2005, when a
second clash over the Imia/Kardak islet arose
between the two countries’ coastguards but was
rapidly defused by both governments.
The Ongoing Problems

• However, there were also negative sides.

• The long-running dispute over territorial waters had not gone
away – in fact in 2005, the Turkish military actually reasserted
the casus belli resolution passed by the Turkish parliament ten
years earlier.
• Mutual complaints regarding the treatment of minority
populations (Greek in Türkiye, Turkish in Greece) continued.
• On its side, the Turkish government failed to take conciliatory
and relatively cost-free steps that had long been advocated, such
as the reopening of the Greek Orthodox seminary on the
Marmara island of Heybeli (Halki), a partial withdrawal of its
large contingent of troops from Cyprus, and recognition of the
‘Ecumenical’ title of Patriarch Bartholomew.
• Although exploratory talks on the territorial
waters and continental shelf disputes had begun
after the EU Helsinki summit of December 1999,
no progress had been reported, and the recourse to
the International Court envisaged at Helsinki
remained unimplemented.
• The continuing Aegean disagreement, and even
more the Cyprus dispute, still had to be counted as
the least successful theatre of Türkiye’s post-Cold
War foreign policy.
Further Readings for Cyprus Issue and
Türkiye-Greece Relations
• [Link]
• [Link]
[Link]
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[Link]
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• [Link]
[Link]
• [Link]
on-Maritime-Boundary-Energy-Issues-in-the-Eastern-
[Link]
Türkiye and the Balkans

• While Türkiye’s policies towards Cyprus and Greece clearly

conflicted with the interests of its NATO allies, the developing
ethnic conflicts in the Balkans during the 1990s – especially in
former Yugoslavia – had the opposite effect.
• The Turks were closely concerned with the developing
western military role, first in Bosnia-Herzegovina, beginning
in 1993, and then in Kosovo in 1999.
• Far from opposing it in principle, their main complaint,
especially before 1995, was that it was not speedy or effective
enough. Once NATO had become heavily involved in these
and the neighbouring republics, Türkiye was usually
enthusiastic and active in its support.
• On the one hand, domestic public opinion strongly favoured the
Muslim side in the bloody conflict in Bosnia, and later in
Kosovo. Turks saw Muslim Bosnia as the last remnant of a once
powerful Muslim presence in south-east Europe.
• On the other hand, successive Turkish governments recognized
that they could not intervene unilaterally or independently in
Bosnia, partly because of its distance from Turkish territory and
partly because Türkiye could not afford to step too far out of line
with the policies of its western allies, primarily the United States.
• Hence, Turkish governments concentrated their efforts on
drawing international attention to the plight of the Bosnian
Muslims and pressing their allies to intervene on their behalf.
• At the Helsinki summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in
Europe (CSCE) in July 1992, Prime Minister Demirel tried to mobilize a
pressure group including the central Asian republics and Azerbaijan in
support of the Bosnian government, and urged President Bush to launch a
major military intervention, similar to that against Iraq in 1991.
• In August 1992, the government also attempted to persuade the permanent
members of the UN Security Council to adopt an ‘Action Plan’ calling for
limited air strikes against the Serbs, although with no involvement of
ground forces.
• Rebuffed by the western powers, Türkiye turned to fellow Muslim
countries, a campaign in which President Özal played a prominent role. In
December 1992, Türkiye joined other members of the Organization of the
Islamic Conference in threatening to send arms to the Bosnian Muslims
after 15 January 1993 if the UN had not taken adequate measures to protect
them by then, although when the time came this threat remained
unimplemented.
• In the face of appalling tragedies and atrocities, the western
powers were slowly coming round to a more robust view of their
responsibilities in Bosnia.
• Once the UN had set up a special protection force for Bosnia
(UNPROFOR) then Türkiye pressed to be included in it. After
some prevarication, in March 1994, the UN Secretary- General
announced that a Turkish detachment would be accepted.
Consisting of about 1,500 troops, it arrived in Bosnia in July
1994, and was stationed at the town of Zeneca, in the western
part of the country, where its main task was to monitor the
ceasefire between the local Croat and Bosnian-Muslim forces.
• Its presence was strongly attacked by Greece, but welcomed by both the
Croat and Bosnian Muslims, besides helping to reassure Turkish
opinion that Türkiye was playing a direct and positive role in Bosnia.
• Diplomatically, Türkiye also enhanced its image as a helpful ally to the
west by brokering an entente between the Croats and Bosnian Muslims,
resulting in the establishment of a Muslim-Croat Federation under the
Washington Agreement of March 1994.
• Türkiye and Croatia developed close relations, mainly due to their
common hostility to Serbia, but the entente also underlined the Turkish
argument that the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina was not a
straightforward war between Christians and Muslims. Meanwhile, it
was reported that Türkiye was covertly supplying arms to the Bosnian
Muslims (presumably with American compliance) via Croatia, although
these accounts could not officially be confirmed.
• The most critical turning point in the Bosnian story came in
1995, following the capture by the Serbs of Srebrenica and
Zepa, two of the supposedly ‘safe areas’ in eastern Bosnia,
in July and the massacre and flight of their inhabitants.
• On 30 August, NATO air forces at last launched all-out air
attacks on Serbian ground positions in an operation known
as ‘Deliberate Force’, which lasted until 14 September.
Following these attacks, Croat forces recaptured large areas
of Croatia previously taken by the Serbs, and the Belgrade
government was forced to the conference table.
• Under the agreements signed at Dayton, Ohio on 21
November 1995, Bosnia-Herzegovina was reconstituted,
nominally as a single state, consisting of the Muslim-Croat
federation and the Bosnian Serb republic, or ‘Republika
Serbska’.
• These events effectively removed the Bosnian problem as a
source of potential conflict between Türkiye and the
western powers, since NATO had now intervened
effectively to protect the Bosnian Muslims. The Turkish
peacekeeping force stayed on in Bosnia-Herzegovina as a
useful part of the international implementation force (IFOR:
reconstituted as the ‘stabilization force’, or SFOR, in 1996).
• Following the Dayton agreement, conflicts in the Balkans seemed
to have become stabilized, up to the time of the eruption of the
crisis in Kosovo in 1998–9.
• Although the UN Security Council had not specifically
authorized the use of force in Kosovo, NATO began a campaign
of intensive air strikes against Serbian targets in Kosovo and in
Serbia itself on 23 March 1999, triggering off the expulsion of
almost a million Kosovar Albanians into the neighbouring
republics of Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro.
• The campaign lasted until 10 June, when Serbian forces were
withdrawn from Kosovo, and an international peacekeeping
force, known as KFOR, was installed in the province.
• At the outset, it appears that the Turkish foreign ministry was not
enthusiastic about the prospect of a NATO intervention in
Kosovo. In the Balkan context, the official detachment of Kosovo
from Yugoslavia – either as an independent state or as part of
Albania – could have acted as a precedent for the territorial
break-up of Macedonia, with its large Albanian minority, which
Türkiye strongly opposed.
• At worst, it could even have threatened to provoke a much wider
Balkan war, in which Greece and Türkiye could have been
dragged in on opposite sides. However, the sheer scale and
brutality of the Serbian action against the Kosovar Albanians
meant that Türkiye, as a fellow-Muslim nation, could hardly
stand aside.
• On these grounds, Türkiye strongly supported the NATO
action in Kosovo, providing a detachment of F-16
fighters, based in Italy that, according to the Turkish
press, played an active role in the operation.
• Around 8,000 refugees from Kosovo were accommodated
in Türkiye and substantial aid was sent to those taking
temporary refuge in Albania. Following the Serbian
withdrawal from Kosovo, Türkiye sent a detachment of
around 1,000 troops to join KFOR, who arrived in July
1999. They were stationed in the town of Prizren, which
is largely inhabited by Kosovo’s minority of ethnic Turks.
• With the end of the fighting in Kosovo, the situation in the
western Balkans stabilized. Following the ouster of Slobodan
Milosevic as President of Serbia in 2000, and his succession by
Vojislav Kostinica, Türkiye re-established diplomatic links with
Belgrade, and was able to rebuild its bridges with Serbia as well
as develop its links with the other ex-Yugoslav republics. In this
way, it came to acquire a valuable mediator role between Bosnia-
Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia.
• Its recognition of Kosovo as an independent state in 2008
(reversing its initial attitude) caused a serious clash with
Belgrade, in which Serbia temporarily withdrew its ambassador
from Ankara, and the Turkish embassy in Belgrade was attacked
by a furious mob.
• Nonetheless, links were fully restored by October 2009, when Abdullah
Gül became the first Turkish President to visit Serbia for 23 years and
declared that relations between the two countries had never been better.
Following the visit, Ahmet Davutoğlu was engaged in intense shuttle
diplomacy between Sarajevo and Belgrade that resulted in the adoption by
the Serbian parliament of a ‘Declaration of Srebrenica’ in March 2010,
officially apologizing for the massacre of 1995.
• Besides this, Türkiye’s most significant diplomatic achievement was
brokering an agreement between Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia,
known as the ‘Istanbul Declaration on Peace and Stability in the Balkans’,
signed in April 2010, in which the three governments pledged to improve
cooperation and work towards integration with the European Union. With
Türkiye supporting the three states’ bids for membership of NATO as well
as eventual accession to the EU, there was strong concordance between
Turkish and both EU and US policies.
 Relations with Bulgaria
• Elsewhere in the Balkans, the end of communism
had its most dramatic effects for Türkiye in the
fall of the Zhivkov regime in Bulgaria in
November 1989, which ended the Bulgarian
campaign against the Turkish minority.
• Subsequent Bulgarian governments recognized
the cultural rights of the Turks, and allowed them
to play a full part in Bulgaria’s new democratic
system. As a result, at least half of the 312,000
Turkish refugees from Bulgaria returned to their
homes in 1990 and afterwards.
• Türkiye and Bulgaria signed a Treaty of
Friendship, Neighbourly Relations and Security in
1992. While Bulgaria’s small size and the poor
state of its economy obviously restricted this,
economic collaboration was also developed.
• By 1999, Türkiye was lobbying in Washington for
Bulgaria’s admission to NATO, achieved in
March 2004, as well as its membership of the EU,
which it joined in January 2007.
• On the other hand, during one of his trips to Bosnia in 2009, Ahmet
Davutoğlu had a rare lapse into ‘neo-Ottomanism’ when he remarked
that ‘the Ottoman centuries of the Balkans were a success story. Now
we have to reinvent this’.
• Such remarks might go down well with a Muslim audience in the
Balkans, but were likely to have the opposite effect for the non-Muslim
majority.
• In other respects, Türkiye’s generally cautious approach in the Balkans
during the 1990s appeared to have paid good dividends, since it had
helped to prevent Bulgaria as well as Macedonia from slipping into an
anti-Muslim or anti-Turkish Slavic bloc led by Greece.
• Equally, a ‘Muslim belt’ failed to emerge, as Turkish policy carefully
avoided creating one.
• Thanks to its earlier hostility towards Macedonia and its
friendship with Serbia, Greece had been on the losing side
in Balkan conflicts and the odd man out in NATO – in
contrast to Türkiye.
• These points seem to have been recognized by the Simitis
government, which revised Greek policies in the Balkans, as
well as softening Greek attitudes towards the Turks.
• In fact, as part of the dramatic thaw in relations between
Ankara and Athens, the two governments even agreed to
discuss joint projects on rebuilding Kosovo, and a common
approach to Balkan security problems.
 Further Readings
• Balkans / Rep. of Türkiye Ministry of Foreign
Affairs ([Link])
• Relations with the Balkan Region / Rep. of
Türkiye Ministry of Foreign Affairs ([Link])