While the Greek government and media rolled around in the playground sandbox, frolicking over the latest cabinet reshuffle, an inconsequential round of party musical chairs, the Turks are escalating their latest provocations over Agathonisi and Pharmakonisi with the clear intent of causing a shooting incident with unforeseen consequences (see previous post).
Apparently incensed over President Papoulias’s remarks from Agathonisi yesterday, pointing to the Turkish army’s involvement in politics as the crux of the problems Turkey is causing in the Aegean, the Turkish military establishment -- with the consent, no doubt, of the “moderate” Islamic government of Karamanlis’s “friend",” Mr. Erdogan -- unleashed its fighter jets over the two small Greek islands again this morning in an extremely dangerous game of chicken with a Greek search-and-rescue helicopter and Greek fighters flying bogey shoot down patrol.
The Turks orchestrated the incident carefully. Early this morning, an unidentified caller alerted Greek authorities that 15 illegal immigrants were supposedly at sea near Agathonisi and running the risk of drowning. As in all such cases, Greek assets were launched in a search-and-rescue operation. But neither a SAR helo, nor a Hellenic Navy gunboat could locate any illegals floating. With first light though, and with the SAR helo in the air, Turkish air defense controllers warned the helo pilot repeatedly that he was flying inside Turkish airspace, when the helo was flying near Agathonisi. Soon, a pair of Turkish F-16s arrived to zoom over the islands and begin dangerous loop-the-loop maneuvers near the Greek helicopter. With the helo pilot executing a near emergency landing, the
Turks flew over Pharmakonisi at a reported altitude of less than 200 meters, an extremely provocative maneuver by extremely fast-moving armed fighters. When the Greek bogey patrol arrived, the Turks looped the loop again and turned tail to fly back to the safety of their Asian airspace (see news story).
The Greek foreign ministry is again lodging protests with its opposite in Ankara, but this is not an issue of diplomatic protests any longer. The Turks are deliberately challenging Greek sovereignty over inhabited Dodecanese islands, something Ankara had never tried before. Mr. Karamanlis better shift his attention immediately away from the reshuffle kindergarten play and try to mobilize the country’s defense forces into a state of alert. The Turks are entering obviously an “incident escalation phase” which Greece should be better prepared to face than the similar Turkish action around the Greek Imia islets on January 30-31, 1996.
(Helicopter photo: Eurocopter AS 332 Super Puma, similar to those flown by Greece, photographed by Dmitry A. Mottl at Le Bourget airport, France)
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