KALAMATA. “Turkey’s provocativeness will not pass,” President of the Hellenic Republic Prokopios Pavlopoulos said on Sunday, while speaking at a dinner given in his honour in the city of Kalamata, where he attended celebrations for the city’s patron saint.
Talking of the problems caused by Turkey’s “shameless provocativeness”, Pavlopoulos sent a message that both this “and its equally provocative fantasies of a supposed right of the mighty will be crushed before the indomitable will and strength of the Greek people to impose, by every legal means, the fully implemetation of international and European law in their entirety.”
“In this framework, we will defend our territory, borders and Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), which are also the territory, borders and EEZ of the European Union,” he added.
Pavlopoulos stressed that Greece’s national sovereignty in all its forms is non-negotiable at any forum and that there were no “grey zones” in the Aegean, since the extent of Greece’s EEZ was defined precisely by the 1982 Montego Bay treaty on the law of the sea, which was also binding for Turkey as a generally accepted set of rules of international law.
Consequently, he added, Greece will not tolerate any violation of the law of the sea and its own EEZ and thus considered the Turkey-Libya “memorandum” completely invalid and utterly void, producing no effect. This, he pointed out, was not a position held only by Greece but also by the international community and the EU.
In a message to the United States and the EU, meanwhile, the Greek president pointed out the reasons why they must support Greece:
“Firstly, to our European family, the EU, it must be aware that Greece’s struggle also concerns its own vital affairs, especially its territory, borders and EEZ. Therefore, it must react accordingly and dynamically in the face of Turkish lawlessness, especially since tolerating this lawlessness would create an extremely negative precedent as regards the implementation of international law and especially the law of the sea, which the EU then risks coming up against in every other part of its sea borders.
“Secondly, to the US, I say that they have an obligation to actively acknowledge, in the face of a Turkey that ‘sails under flags of convenience’, that Greece is and will remain a steadfast and reliable ally, both on a bilateral level and on a NATO level. Therefore, they have an obligation to respond accordingly and actively when Turkey violates international law…”
The president also repeated a statement he made after the Sunday morning mass, when he called for Greece to “to be fully united in defending to the utmost our national issues and national rights and to gain the future we deserve.”
foto Eurokinissi