Thanks Ioanni, as usual the OKDE (Spartakos) statement on these matters is excellent, sadly one of the very few voices in Greece challenging the dominant nationalist narrative, lots of good and thorough info on the extremely complex EEZ-continental shelf-territorial waters issues between various tiny Greek islands and the Turkish coast. The Greek nationalist position, shared by the entire left, effectively locks Turkey right out and inevitably Turkey will challenge it.
There is probably some underestimation of Turkey’s own aggressiveness in the OKDE statement, even if there is some “justification” from a “national” point of view as you explain well (and with Erdogan’s current ally Bahceli from the fascist MHP making “war” noises all the more dangerous). For example, the Greek-Egyptian EEZ that locked out Turkey was widely seen as a response to the Turkey-Libya EEZ declared a few months earlier that locked out Greece, in particular, completely ignoring the existence of the very large island of Crete. However, if the earlier Greece-Cyprus-Israel gas agreement included an EEZ that locked out Turkey (I wasn’t aware of that detail) then of course the Turkey-Libya was merely a response to that. Meanwhile, the continued Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus (recognised, rightly in my view, by no-one in the world) is not irrelevant either in the rising east Mediterranean gas dispute. Of course, as a Greek organisation, OKDE is right to focus its energies opposing Greek nationalism, and all the more so since that nationalist view is so hegemonic in Greece (and for various reasons, among much of the western left, especially campist leftists, who always seem to know that Turkey is “NATO” but don’t seem to know that Greece is – probably due to Greece’s traditional nationalist-based relations with their ‘Mother Russia’ – very ironic in current circumstances with the Greek alliance with Israel and the solidarity of all the imperialist West with Greece in the dispute). But the point at the end of the statement “No mining and extractions in the Mediterranean” is the best response to all this gas pipeline sub-imperialist rivalry. As the article Louis sent explains, the Greece-Cyprus-Israel-Egypt stand-off against Turkey in the east Mediterranean is closely connected to the Libya crisis, where Turkey (and Qatar) alone stand with the MB-infuenced (and internationally-recognised) Libyan government against a vast coalition supporting the renegade general Haftar’s attempt to violently force out the government. This coalition behind Haftar (and against Turkey) includes Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Syria’s Assad regime, Russia and France. When combined with the east Mediterranean stand-off against Turkey, as well as Turkey’s stand with the remaining rebels in north-west Syria, protecting Idlib against the Assad regime, and its confrontation with the US-backed SDF in northeast Syria (where, by contrast, Turkey is the oppressor), what we see is a most impressive regional anti-Turkish coalition. The size and array of this anti-Turkey coalition is difficult to fathom. Turkey’s only ally is the tiny but economically powerful Qatari sheikdom, which stands isolated among the anti-Turkish Gulf monarchies, along with the Hamas rulers of Gaza (Erdogan was recently castigated by Washington for hosting a high-level Hamas delegation while Pompeo was in Jerusalem). The Turkish-Qatari attempt to ride a populist MB horse to internally co-opt the Arab Spring uprisings, as opposed to the more “direct” methods of suppression preferred elsewhere, guaranteed the Emirati-Saudi-Israeli-Assadist hostility, joined by Egypt when the UAE and Saudis aided Sisi’s bloody coup against the MB government there. This then got tied up with the Mediterranean gas rivalries; and perhaps there is a more general apprehension among traditional sub-imperial states in the region that Erdogan is just pushing Turkey’s weight around too much for comfort, disrupting their comfortable regional order, and so they, along with major imperialist powers, prefer it to be put back into its box. Meanwhile, however, the Erdogan regime’s own turn to the right since around 2016, whereby Syria policy came to be dominated more by anti-Kurdish hostility than any real dedication to Assad’s overthrow (though, with nearly 4 million refugees from Syria, it can also not let Idlib fall), abandoning its own ‘peace process’ with the PKK, aligning with the MHP, and doing on and off opportunist deals with Russia in Syria (which Russia respects for a while then starts bombing Idlib again), revealed the exhaustion of the populist strategy; direct suppression was adopted by Turkey as well. Its anti-Kurdish policy actually brings Turkey and Iran together in a kind of alliance, despite supporting opposite sides in Syria; as it happens, while both Russia and the Assad regime have thrown great resources into backing Haftar in Libya, Iranian leaders in Turkey recently declared their solidarity with Turkey’s position in Libya, almost alone in the region. And it also happens that the grand anti-Turkish coalition is also largely anti-Iranian. While the Assad regime is an exception, this is because the regime is trying to balance between its two great benefactors, Iran and Russia, which are themselves in an increasing stand-off in Syria, rivals to the domination of Syria’s corpse and grave-digger regime. Israel, Egypt and the UAE all line up with the Russian position in Syria; notably, Russia’s anti-aircraft system in Syria never seems to mind Israel constantly hitting Iranian targets there, as long as this has no effect on Assad’s military capacity (it doesn’t). No coincidence that the UAE has been first to break the Arab boycott on both Israel and on the Assad regime (holding an identical position to Sisi’s dictatorship in Egypt). At one point this year, the UAE even encouraged Assad to attack the Idlib rebels at a time when even Russia was asking it to hold back (it was only a week or so after Russia had signed another “ceasefire” agreement with Turkey, not a respectable enough period). Naturally, these scenarios make mincemeat of inane campist analyses of the region based on simpleton ‘anti-imperialism.” More importantly, it would appear that the crushing of the Arab Spring uprisings may be leading to a more dangerous period of sub-imperial rivalry, influenced, however, by some of the very alliances created to crush the Spring. <https://www-economist-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/printedition/2020-08-22> On Tue, Sep 8, 2020 at 2:29 PM ioannis aposperites <[email protected]> wrote: > The current Greek-Turkish crisis in the Mediterranean is not the result > of an alleged unilateral aggression and provocation by Turkey. Nor is > it, in abstract, the result of the intensification of imperialist > rivalries or the rival claims of the bourgeoisies of Greece and Turkey. > The specific reason for the crisis has been the agreement of the Greek > government with the dictator of Egypt in the context of a policy of the > Greek bourgeoisie that aims to exclude the Turkish bourgeoisie from > access to the - still controversial - wealth-producing resources of the > SE Mediterranean. General pacifist propaganda, no matter how necessary > it may be, is not enough in a period of dangerous war games. The > dangerous belligerence of the Greek state must be revealed, which > exposes the working class and the people to the risk of a catastrophic > war for the interests of the capitalists. > > Full at > > > http://www.okde.org/index.php/en/announcements/86-anakoinwseis/825-for-an-internationalist-anti-war-movement-against-national-myths?fbclid=IwAR2zMvrW6INew4AZTChU-uJaglafJXld7XOLZUbW0K1f9Koq6d563SW0ab4 > > JA > > > > > > > > > > > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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