WHILE President Trump is celebrating the Israel-UAE alliance against Iran and Palestine, and planning to extend it throughout the region, his NATO allies are getting ready to cut each other’s throats in the Med.
Turkish Foreign Minister Cavusoglu yesterday warned Greece that its plans to extend its territorial waters would be taken by Turkey as a declaration of war.
Turkey’s discovery of major gas deposits in waters surrounding Crete and Cyprus has further escalated tensions between the two states.
Cavusoglu has now warned France against supporting Greece, saying that Paris wants to create a security force of the EU against NATO. Turkey is signalling to the USA its willingness to help the USA curb the EU. ‘NATO is one of the goals of the current escalation,’ Cavusoglu added.
The Turkish military has launched fresh war games in the eastern Mediterranean region, as tensions between Ankara and Athens mount over maritime borders and gas drilling rights.
The EU is taking the side of Greece, with France last week deploying its naval forces to hold joint military exercises with Greece along with Italy and Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean.
Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay has attacked as ‘hypocritical’ a threat by the EU to impose sanctions on Ankara, saying that: ‘We are proficient in the language of peace and diplomacy, but will not hesitate to do the necessary thing when it comes to defending Turkey’s rights and interests. France and Greece know that better than anyone,’ he added.
EU Foreign Policy Chief, Josep Borrell, who said that the bloc was preparing to slap sanctions on Turkey to curtail Turkey’s ability to explore for natural gas in the contested waters of the region, and could, according to Borrell, target individuals, Turkish ships and the use of European ports.
‘We can go to measures related to sectoral activities … where the Turkish economy is related to the European economy,’ Borrell told a news conference recently in reference to the possible sanctions.
On Friday, August 28, Turkey declared that it would hold military drills off northwest Cyprus in the coming weeks.
Following that, the Turkish military issued a warning to mariners, known as a Navtex, which said it would be holding a ‘gunnery exercise’ from Saturday August 29th until September 11th. Before that, on August 12th, Greek and Turkish frigates that were following one of Ankara’s oil and gas survey ships, the Oruc Reis, collided.
Turkish and Greek F-16 fighter jets have already engaged in a mock ‘dogfight’ over the Mediterranean as Ankara dispatched its planes to intercept six Greek jets as they returned from war games in Cyprus. The Med region was not always a powder keg ready to be exploded by the NATO alliance, and the EU.
It was Colonel Gadaffi who warned the UK and NATO that if it moved to remove him through military action, then Libya would be carved up by Islamists and the whole region would be propelled into a massive oil war.
The Middle East and the Med region is set to explode and end the US plans for a signing ceremony in Washington of the normalisation deal with the Unite Arab Emirates in which the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia was due to participate, to seal the anti-Palestine and anti-Iran alliance.
Israeli minister Ofir Akunis said yesterday that the date for the signing ceremony could be decided by senior aides to Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump in Abu Dhabi today.
In fact, the fear of Arab and Muslim leaders of the consequences of making a deal with Israel and selling out Palestine is very great. The Sudan leadership told US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ‘NO’ and rejected a major financial bribe, such is the fear of the Arab revolution.
What is required in the Med region are not imperialist wars but socialist revolutions. The Greek and Turkish workers must unite to prevent any war in the Med. Their enemy is at home. It is the EU capitalists that have destroyed Greece, not the Turkish workers nor any other section of the working class.
The workers of Greece, Turkey, the UK, France and Germany must ally themselves with Palestine and Iran. The only way out of the imperialist crisis is to put an end to imperialism through the victory of the world socialist revolution.
