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Greece and Turkey square up over the rights to undersea gas
Even before the fighter jets thundered over and warships sailed into view, Konstantinos Papoutsis was suffering his worst summer in memory.
Covid-19 had already robbed his tourism business on the Greek island of Kastellorizo of almost all its customers. Now, a dispute about undersea gas has brought Greece and Turkey to the brink of conflict in his island’s glittering turquoise waters.
Ankara began threatening to send its seismic survey vessel, Oruc Reis, into the area late last month, upping the stakes in a long-running and unresolved row over the rights to gas discovered around Cyprus. For more than two hours one Monday afternoon in late July, Turkish jets circled low over Kastellorizo, startling the few tourists who were sunbathing beneath.
There was a brief reprieve when President Erdogan agreed to stall Turkey’s explorations in order to hold talks with Athens. But late last week the negotiations broke down, the rhetoric ramped back up and Turkish ships set sail from Antalya on Monday morning. Oruc Reis is now stationed midway between Kastellorizo and Cyprus, accompanied by Ankara’s warships, while Turkish attack helicopters have been circling nearby.
For Mr Papoutsis and the other business owners on the island, the hostility in the skies and the waters are at odds with the warm relations Turks and Greeks enjoy on the ground.
“I can understand it’s a political problem, but it has nothing to do with the people. It’s not normal for these things to be happening every day between us and Turkey,” he told The Times.
“Our relations with the Turkish side were very good. The politicians need to find a solution. They need to finish this.”
Kastellorizo’s proximity to Turkey — it lies four miles from the popular Turkish coastal resort of Kas — is both its blessing and its curse. In a normal summer season, about 60 per cent of the island’s visitors arrive from Turkey. Some are day-trippers who take a break from their Turkish holiday to see its paint box houses and pristine bays.
Others travel to their Greek holiday through Turkish airports and the twice-daily ferry, usually a far quicker route than the plane via Rhodes to the island’s own tiny airport. A few dock their yachts in the harbour — Kastellorizo is a favourite holiday destination for the Turkish elite.
But the proximity also means that the island lies in waters where century-old antagonisms play out. Kemal Ataturk led Turkey’s war of independence against the Greek army following the break up of the Ottoman Empire, seizing back all of the Anatolian mainland, but Athens kept hold of all but four of the islands and islets lying between the two countries, many of which lie in clear sight of the Turkish coast.
According to the UN’s convention on the laws of the sea, a country’s territorial waters extend 12 nautical miles from its coastline, including that of its inhabited islands, while shorter distances between countries should be split down the median line. Turkey, though, is one of the few countries that has not signed the convention.
The discovery of gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean starting in the late 1990s brought this idiosyncrasy to the fore. Turkey had initially hoped to position itself as a transit hub where gas could be brought ashore and liquified. But following the discovery of the Zohr gas field in 2015, alternative plans were formulated to instead bring the gas ashore in Egypt.
Cyprus, Israel, Greece and Egypt have since signed a series of agreements marking out maritime borders and agreeing pipeline routes, leaving Turkey out in the cold.
In response, from 2017 Ankara began sending the Oruc Reis and the drill ships Fatih and Yavuz into Cypriot waters to start its own explorations, claiming that the Turkish Cypriots were being unfairly excluded from the bounty of the discoveries.
It sent its warships to block the commercial drilling vessels that had been contracted by the Republic of Cyprus. Then, in November, Turkey signed an agreement with Libya’s Tripoli government marking out the waters stretching between the two countries as their respective maritimes territories, despite the fact that the area cuts across several Greek islands and skirts Crete.
Last Thursday, Greece signed a similar agreement with Egypt, slicing across the Turkey-Libya zone and sparking the delicate game of brinkmanship now under way in the sea between Kastellorizo and Cyprus. Greece has put its military on standby. Turkey is insisting it won’t back down.