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Joyeux Noël et Bonne année

By Sadiq Behnam in Herat

The minarets, domes and fortresses that pierce the skyline of Herat testify to its 2,700-year history.

As the gateway to Afghanistan from Iran, many important figures passed through the city – Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Moghul emperor Babur. Some left their mark on the landscape and more than 1,600 monuments make Herat an important centre of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage..

But now the skyline of the city is changing dramatically with development that may threaten government plans to win it coveted World Heritage Site status. Afghanistan has only two such sites at present: the minaret and remains of Jam in Ghur province and the Bamiyan valley, where massive stone Buddhas were destroyed by the Taleban in 2001.

With foreign money flowing in, living standards have increased and a few people have become very rich. Taking advantage of their influence with central government, some developers have won permission to build apartment blocks close to historic sites, ignoring the municipality’s urban master plan.

The new buildings are now rising up right next to sites like the Great Mosque, the citadel of Qala-i Ikhtiyaruddin and the Musallah complex of religious buildings.

Experts in historic sites are concerned, and have been trying to stop the construction but their efforts have proved futile.

Ayamodin Ajmal, the director of maintenance of historic monuments in Herat, said, “The new buildings have caused considerable damage to the historic look of Herat. I’ve tried to take up this issue with the government office responsible for giving permission but nothing has been done. The construction of new buildings is still going on.”

A commission set up in cooperation with the department of information and culture, says Ajmal, has ruled that no buildings more than seven and ten metres high should be allowed in the old city and around historic sites respectively. “But new buildings are still being constructed, based on orders they receive from the capital,” he said.

Ajmal cites one case that concerns him. “The Farzad association, for example, built tall buildings along the street that leads to the Great Mosque of Herat. The municipality did not allow them to do so, but Kabul gave permission. Now they can build five storey buildings. If this building process continues, it will cause great damage to the historic identity of the city.”

The owner of the Farzad Business Association, Mohammad Mohammadi, denies doing anything wrong in putting up a six-storey building 200 m from the Great Mosque.

“I’ve got the official permission and all other documents from the capital. If the construction was not legal, why did they allow me to build? Now I’ve spent lots of money here, and I am not allowing anyone to destroy my building,” he said.

The mayor of Herat, Mohammad Salim Taraki, is reluctant to talk about the issue. Eventually he said, “Only if we get financial support can we implement the urban master plan and counter illegal building.”

Meanwhile, the building near historic sites continues, sometimes by rich and powerful people, but also by those with less obvious influence. Some time ago, the mullah of the 500-year-old Qawdal Mosque ordered the building to be pulled down so that a new one could be constructed. Experts say up to 100 monuments have gone in this way, an irreplaceable loss.

German archaeologists have been active in the area and have found relics dating from 2,700 years ago in and around Herat.

The United Nations cultural organisation UNESCO is gravely concerned about building near historic sites, and will send a delegation to Herat shortly to assess the damage.

A working group of UNESCO experts last year welcomed a commitment by the governor of Herat to work towards the preservation of the old city. UNESCO experts have already been active in advising on preservation of some of the monuments.

Afghanistan in 2004 placed Herat on its tentative list of sites for which it hopes to seek World Heritage Site status and the experts recommended that the process continue.

The working group said a World Heritage Site could encompass much of the old city or could be a smaller zone encompassing the Musallah complex and the 15th century Fifth Minaret.

World Heritage Site status involves a commitment not to harm the setting of a monument as well as preserving the structure itself.

If nothing is done to stop the construction, Herat risks exclusion from the list of historic heritage centres of the world, says Reza Sharifi, a local UNESCO official responsible for western Afghanistan. “If the government doesn’t meet UNESCO’s demands regarding maintenance of historic relics and monuments, and the construction of new buildings continues against the rules, Herat might be excluded from our list,” he said.

Nematollah Sarwari, the director of the department of information and culture in Herat, says the local government is trying to stop the construction, “It is very difficult. We have been able to stop construction of buildings near the Musallah complex but we haven’t been able to stop the Farzad association from building.”

If the building process continues, Herat will lose its historic identity, says Masud Rajayi, an archaeologist and professor at Herat University, “The government is aware of the problem, but it hasn’t taken any action. It is up to the people to do something about it.”

Sadiq Behnam is an IWPR-trained reporter in Herat.

It was a distinctly un-Saudi affair. The traditionally cautious kingdom, careful to the point where its diplomatic initiatives must be guaranteed to succeed before they are even launched, found itself militarily thrown into the internal conflict in neighbouring Yemen.

In the past two weeks Saudi warplanes have bombed border positions of Houthi rebels battling the Yemeni government. It marks the sixth round of on-and-off fighting that has erupted since 2004.

The Saudis have every reason to be fed up with Yemen, a lawless country of 23m people on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula beset by deep poverty and dysfunctional politics that regularly exports its troubles.

Governments far beyond Yemen’s borders should also be alarmed at the deteriorating security in a country that has long been a breeding ground for the religious extremists of al-Qaeda.

The rebellion of the Houthis, members of the Zaydi Shia sect that is, however, closer in its practices to a branch of Sunni Islam than to mainstream Shia Islam, is just one of a series of economic and political problems facing the government, including a secessionist movement in the south (north and south Yemen were only united in 1990) and the persistent al-Qaeda presence.

With population growth among the highest in the world and resources dwindling – Yemen is running out of water as well as oil – it is reasonable to predict worsening instability. Yemen is not Afghanistan or Somalia, but there are real fears among western officials that it is on its way to becoming a failed and regionally destabilising state. Over the past year, Yemen’s accumulating mess has looked threatening for Saudi Arabia: the merger of the Yemeni and Saudi branches of al-Qaeda has provided a new base for Saudi fanatics chased away from the kingdom by a security crackdown.

How the Saudis, supporters and generous financial backers to the government, became embroiled in a conflict with complex historic, religious and social roots depends on whose version you believe. The Saudis say they have been trying to clean up a long, porous border and push the Houthis away after a rebel infiltration killed a Saudi border guard. The Houthis tell us, through their website, that the Saudis have been in this war for a while, allowing Yemeni troops to use their territory to encircle the rebels.

There is, however, a potentially more dangerous dimension to this conflict. The Saudis see the Houthis as a tool in the hands of Iran as the Islamic Republic attempts to widen its influence in the region. In official circles, the conflict in Yemen is portrayed as a struggle between a Shia sect and a Sunni-dominated government, not unlike the internal political fight in Lebanon, where Saudi Arabia has long backed a Sunni-led coalition and Iran the Hizbollah-led opposition.

No doubt it seemed an opportune time to stand up to Iran as the regime has looked vulnerable since the rigging of the June presidential election and its violent aftermath. (If you read the Saudi press at that time you would think the Iranian regime had in fact collapsed.)

The Saudis and Iranians – the Gulf’s two major powers – have been battling it out through their media for months. Iran has accused Riyadh of involvement in the disappearance of a nuclear scientist and has been enraged by the Saudi move to fingerprint Iranians travelling to Mecca to perform the Haj pilgrimage.

The Saudi bombing of Houthi positions is adding fuel to the fire. This week, Iran’s joint chief of staff Hassan Firouzabadi called Saudi attacks “state terrorism” and Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh accused Iran of “collusion in sin and aggression”. A group of Saudi clerics lambasted Iran for allegedly “financing and arming” agents to spread Shia Islam across Sunni lands.

The irony is that no one outside the Middle East believes that Iran has much to do with the Houthis. Officials in the west argue that although Iran sympathises with the rebels, there is no evidence of military or financial support.

Maybe these outsiders are talking nonsense. But maybe Saudi Arabia is allowing its resentment of Iran to cloud its judgment over Yemen. The Houthi rebellion is, above all, a reflection of social, religious and political grievances by a group that feels marginalised and considers that the state has succumbed to radical Sunni Salafi ideology. The Houthis are not moderate – their commander says their “cultural” platform is based on the slogans of “God is Great, Death to America and Death to Israel”. But in an interview with a Lebanese newspaper, he also says that the rebels want an end to discrimination and government military action and not, as is often assumed, the reimposition of a Zaydi state (an imamate that ruled the capital Sana’a until a coup in 1962).

The even greater irony in this conflict is that Saudi involvement is certain to aggravate the grievances and possibly prolong the fighting. The rising destruction, casualties and displacement of the population have fed the rebellion, widening its territorial scope and winning the rebels thousands of new recruits. “The ultimate travesty is there is no way to militarily solve the problem – you need a humanitarian ceasefire and mediation,” says Christopher Boucek, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East programme. If stability is the aim in Yemen, then, as Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, argues, Saudi Arabia needs a policy that is neither “throwing money” at the problem nor military intervention.

Back in May, a few months before the latest round of fighting, a sensible report by the International Crisis Group recommended that Yemen use its traditional instruments of co-option and social and religious tolerance to create a more inclusive state, reducing sectarian discrimination and bringing in the Houthis. It called on Gulf states and western governments to exercise their leverage and the promise of reconstruction aid to nudge the government and the rebels towards compromise.

By the Middle East’s standards of violence, the Yemen conflict is a small war – and so can be easily ignored. But as the ICG warned: “In duration and intensity, destruction, casualties, sectarian stigmatisation and regional dimension, [it] stands apart from other violent episodes in Yemen. It will need more than run-of-the-mill domestic and international efforts to end it.”

roula.khalaf@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

New guidelines for cervical cancer screening say women should delay their first Pap test until age 21, and be screened less often than recommended in the past.

The advice, from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is meant to decrease unnecessary testing and potentially harmful treatment, particularly in teenagers and young women. The group’s previous guidelines had recommended yearly testing for young women, starting within three years of their first sexual intercourse, but no later than age 21.

Arriving on the heels of hotly disputed guidelines calling for less use of mammography, the new recommendations might seem like part of a larger plan to slash cancer screening for women. But the timing was coincidental, said Dr. Cheryl B. Iglesia, the chairwoman of a panel in the obstetricians’ group that developed the Pap smear guidelines. The group updates its advice regularly based on new medical information, and Dr. Iglesia said the latest recommendations had been in the works for several years, “long before the Obama health plan came into existence.”

She called the timing crazy, uncanny and “an unfortunate perfect storm,” adding, “There’s no political agenda with regard to these recommendations.”

Dr. Iglesia said the argument for changing Pap screening was more compelling than that for cutting back on mammography — which the obstetricians’ group has staunchly opposed — because there is more potential for harm from the overuse of Pap tests. The reason is that young women are especially prone to develop abnormalities in the cervix that appear to be precancerous, but that will go away if left alone. But when Pap tests find the growths, doctors often remove them, with procedures that can injure the cervix and lead to problems later when a woman becomes pregnant, including premature birth and an increased risk of needing a Caesarean.

Still, the new recommendations for Pap tests are likely to feed a political debate in Washington over health care overhaul proposals. The mammogram advice led some Republicans to predict that such recommendations would lead to rationing.

Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma who is also a physician, said in an interview that he would continue to offer Pap smears to sexually active young women. Democratic proposals to involve the government more deeply in the nation’s health care system, he said, would lead the new mammography, Pap smear and other guidelines to be adopted without regard to patient differences, hurting many people.

“These are going to be set in stone,” Mr. Coburn said.

Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Democrat and longtime advocate for cancer screening, said in an interview: “And this Pap smear guideline is yet another cut back in screening? That is curious.” Mr. Specter, who was treated for Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2005 and 2008, said Congress was committed to increasing cancer screenings, not limiting them.

Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said that the new guidelines would have no effect on federal policy and that “Republicans are using these new recommendations as a distraction.”

“Making such arguments, especially at this critical point in the debate, merely clouds the very simple issue that our health reform bill would increase access to care for millions of women across the country,” she said.

There are 11,270 new cases of cervical cancer and 4,070 deaths per year in the United States. One to 2 cases occur per 1,000,000 girls ages 15 to 19 — a low incidence that convinces many doctors that it is safe to wait until 21 to screen.

The doctors’ group also felt it was safe to test women less often because cervical cancer grows slowly, so there is time to catch precancerous growths. Cervical cancer is caused by a sexually transmitted virus, human papillomavirus, or HPV, that is practically ubiquitous. Only some people who are exposed to it develop cancer; in most, the immune system fights off the virus. If cancer does develop, it can take 10 to 20 years after exposure to the virus.

The new guidelines say women 30 and older who have three consecutive Pap tests that were normal, and who have no history of seriously abnormal findings, can stretch the interval between screenings to three years.

In addition, women who have a total hysterectomy (which removes the uterus and cervix) for a noncancerous condition, and who had no severe abnormalities on previous Pap tests, can quit having the tests entirely.

The guidelines also say that women can stop having Pap tests between 65 and 70 if they have three or more negative tests in a row and no abnormal test results in the last 10 years.

The changes do not apply to women with certain health problems that could make them more prone to aggressive cervical cancer, including H.I.V. infection or having an organ transplant or other condition that would lead to a suppressed immune system.

It is by no means clear that doctors or patients will follow the new guidelines. Medical groups, including the American Cancer Society, have been suggesting for years that women with repeated normal Pap tests could begin to have the test less frequently, but many have gone on to have them year after year anyway.

Debbie Saslow, director of breast and gynecologic cancer for the American Cancer Society, said professional groups were particularly concerned because many teenagers and young women were being tested and then needlessly subjected to invasive procedures.

In addition, Dr. Saslow said, doctors in this country have been performing 15 million Pap tests a year to look for cervical cancer in women who have no cervix, because they have had hysterectomies.

Dr. Carol L. Brown, a gynecologic oncologist and surgeon at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, said the new guidelines should probably not be applied to all women, because there are some girls who begin having sex at 12 or 13 and may be prone to develop cervical cancer at an early age.

“I’m concerned that whenever you send a message out to the public to do less, the most vulnerable people at highest risk might take the message and not get screened at all,” Dr. Brown said.

Dr. Kevin M. Holcomb, an associate professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital, said that when he heard the advice to delay Pap testing until 21, “My emotional response is ‘Wow, that seems dangerous,’ and yet I know the chances of an adolescent getting cervical cancer are really low.”

As with the new mammogram recommendations, women may not readily give up a yearly cancer test.

“For people who’ve been having the testing regularly every year, it’s a big emotional change to test less frequently and there’s this fear of ‘Oh my gosh, I might be missing something,’ ” said Ivy Guetta, 49, of Westport, Conn., who plans to continue with annual Pap tests. Ms. Guetta has three daughters, ages 17, 14 and 8, and at the moment, she would not encourage them to wait until they turn 21.

Jen Jemison, 24, a legal assistant from Babylon, N.Y., said she thought she began getting Pap smears when she was about 18, but said that if she had been aware that the procedure for treating precancerous lesions could lead to premature births, she would have waited until she turned 21.

On the other hand, Ms. Jemison said that now that she is over 21, “I would still go every year” for the Pap test.

“One of my cousins had cervical cancer, so that’s in my head too,” she said. “I’d rather get it checked out regularly than have to worry about that.”

Gardiner Harris contributed reporting from Washington, and Pam Belluck from Connecticut.

YAVUZ BAYDAR

 It was inevitable that the Kurdish initiative would put the Republican People’s Party (CHP), more than any other party, in the spotlight, accelerating its already deep identity crisis.

It was also inevitable that Onur Öymen, the shadow leader of CHP ideology, Deniz Baykal’s “right-hand man,” a prototype of the old elite in their last days, would sooner or later hit a wall. He did, and the sound of the “thump” shattered the party’s pillars.

It began with these remarks in Parliament: “Did mothers not cry, too, during the Dersim uprising? Did anyone then say ‘let us stop the operation so that mothers do not cry?’ You (Justice and Development Party (AKP)) are the first ones to say that because you have no courage to fight terror …”

When all hell broke loose, particularly from within his party’s Alevi ranks, Öymen, as was expected of him, was unrepentant. His response to a question on Monday was the following: “Was it me who quelled the uprising? Why did Atatürk behave this way then? Celal Bayar was prime minister, and Fevzi Çakmak was the chief of staff … Were they fascists, too? I am keeping certain things only to myself and am not getting mixed up with them in order not to hurt anybody. I am not saying who did what at that time. I am not recalling what Atatürk said then about it. It does not mean I do not know anything.”

Öymen apparently believes that by sheer and constant denial of the crimes of the past, memories will be whitewashed.

An interesting case, Öymen’s. Like Canan Arıtman, the deputy of the CHP (known for her description of the current president as an “Armenian bastard,” an act of racism she can easily get away with), and many others, Öymen represents a political typology who rather than working hard and spending time and energy within the party has been enjoying the privileges of being parachuted into the top echelon.

A career diplomat, Öymen was known as a staunch nationalist (a term, as might be known, that is rather remote from the concept of social democracy) who knows the ways to appease political leaders, and whenever he managed to build trust, he used his skills for manipulation. As columnist Cengiz Çandar reminded readers a short while ago, it was mainly Öymen’s “work” that escalated tension in the Kardak/Imia crisis that brought Greece and Turkey to the brink of war in the mid ‘90s. He was the undersecretary of the Foreign Ministry then, and as Çandar writes, he misled Tansu Çiller, the then-prime minister, stating that the islet belonged to Turkey.

Whether he was helpful while he was ambassador in Bonn in the early ‘90s in the integration of Turks in Germany or vice versa is open to question. Germans who are knowledgeable of that time would be the best judges of that.

What will happen now? Simply this: Öymen will at best issue a vague, blurred apology. Or he will continue to march on with the similar rhetoric as if nothing happened. Like in the case of Arıtman, he will be taken under the protective wings of Baykal and get away with his harmful act. This is the habitual pattern of the CHP: to deny and go on.

But there is much more to it, more than a simple — but expected — gaffe. Öymen managed to open a big wound in the party. The CHP of today has no moral compass, where the winners of the struggle within, those with a conscience somewhat intact, are the only way out of the mental swamp. The wound will be very hard to heal, and this time the skills of Baykal might not even convince the Alevis.

There are two points that can be made from the Öymen case. First, it became clear that the CHP, having already lost its Kurdish votes, is approaching a point of self scrutiny, which will have to be painful, given its iron fist leadership, or, more and more split, will be instrumental for the radicalization of the masses.

The second point has to do with the CHP’s international affiliation. It is true that the party’s past misbehavior has made its leader lose vice chairmanship of Socialist International (SI), but now the real question is whether the CHP is an asset or a burden for that community. It may be argued that Baykal’s address to Parliament last Friday on the Kurdish initiative makes a fine national socialist reading, and if we add Öymen’s remarks to the picture, those who constantly ask why the CHP is still kept as a member of SI must be heard. SI cannot afford to stay deaf and blind when the CHP, in denial of history, with a lack of conscience, insults the suppressed, voiceless masses rather than embracing them. Whether SI will be able to live with this shame is, indeed, a question demanding an honest and clear ideological response.

YAVUZ BAYDAR

Those who read the latest shocking story in daily Taraf yesterday would possibly not have been able to help smiling ironically.

While the attempts to inject further confusion amongst ill-informed, distracted and already confused “Westerners” — particularly those in Washington, D.C. — about the Ergenekon trial seemingly intensify, Taraf revealed why dozens of naval officers a short while ago were arrested and interrogated: A large cell within the navy — Taraf describes it as a “junta” — has been planning a comprehensive action plan with Turkey’s non-Muslims as the target.

The plan (decoded from the contents of a CD belonging to a mayor who is a detained suspect of Ergenekon) called “kafes” (cage) contains, in four phases, a large set of directives, including the filing of non-Muslims’ whereabouts — work places and where their children study, community registers, etc., — and identities; the systematic exposure of them in public places and on the Internet; the massive usage of media with the aim of discrediting the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) as “indifferent” to those secret threats and accusing the government of being the culprit of all these campaigns. In the final phase, called “action,” it gives details of bombings on the Princes’ Islands near İstanbul (where the non-Muslim density is higher) and kidnappings and assassinations on which the responsibility will later be claimed by fundamentalist organizations.

As of the Malatya slayings of Christian missionaries (a key case which contains all the elements of how the Ergenekon network operates), Priest Santoro’s murder in Trabzon and Hrant Dink’s assassination, this plan (which also contains allegations of assassination plans to murder a former commander of the navy, and a commander of the fleet) has aimed to kill two birds with one stone: it would scare the hell out of the non-Muslim minorities by telling them, simply, “you have no place in this country” and, more importantly, it would send the “strong” message to the world that “Islamo-fascism is now on the full offensive” in Turkey.

The shocking details in this deep investigation may be yet another slap in the face for those who desperately try to make us believe that Ergenekon is closer to fiction than reality.

For people like Ahmet Aras, it is an insult. An elderly Kurdish socialist, a staunch anti-Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) figure, who served as a founding member of Turkey’s Workers’ Party (TİP) in the sixties and suffered massive oppression, Aras welcomes all the revelations with pleasure.

I had invited him onto the TV program “ROTA” that I present to talk about the Dersim uprising/massacre (during which some 15,000 Alevi Kurds were indiscriminately slaughtered in 1937). Almost in tears, he told me: “I had never imagined that I would live to see these days, where a prime minister speaks of crimes of humanity and incredible cruelty.” After years of prison and exile, Aras lives in İzmir, researching Kurdish history.

“I am also very, very glad to see now who was serving Ergenekon and who was not,” he said, referring to his “leftist” comrades. “Some were not leftists or socialists at all, they were only disguised Kemalists; they were part of the big lies that were repeated, year after year.”

It is clear why people like Aras, who had once believed that the struggle of the left could be conducted though free elections and paid dearly (his party, elected to Parliament in the mid ’60s, was forced out of the political scene by constant physical harassment), feel truly insulted when one mentions the efforts to discredit the “real content” of Ergenekon. They feel closer to justice, more than ever before.

Meanwhile, as I predicted, Deniz Baykal, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), taking Onur Öymen under his protective wing, without blinking an eye, continues as if the latter’s Dersim gaffe has no significance. The “pale hope” of the party, deputy Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu of the same party, who also happens to have his origins in Dersim, also switched his rhetoric, saying “the case is closed.”

I asked a knowledgeable retired military judge what the “deep state” (the state within) in Turkey actually is: “It is the chief of general staff and the higher judiciary” was his brief and swift response. He went on: “The executive power, the governments, have never had control over the higher judiciary and never will. Everyone should keep this in mind. The issue is, therefore, to separate forever the higher judiciary from the generals and move it to its independent and impartial position, as is necessary for any democracy.”

Today, Turkey may look as if it is sinking deeper into a crisis. It could very well be to the contrary, at the end of the day. What will happen is this: All the dirty linen is put on the table for cleaning, taboos are broken (the latest approaching firmly to that of Atatürk himself), a nasty struggle is staged in order to separate and “liberate” the judiciary from “the state within” mentality and the “politicized” military is pushed back to its barracks, possibly out of the cities.

 The 1996 Imia crisis is still haunting Greek Foreign Policy.

Thirteen years later, the events which led Greece and Turkey a step closer to war are still current, as long as Ankara continues to raise doubts over Athens’ sovereignty in Aegean Sea.

By the occasion of Michalis Ignatiou and Athanasios Ellis’ book Imia: the classified documents of the Americans, which was published recently, we can examine an aspect of the then incident: the legal situation in eastern Aegean that unambiguously justifies the Greek position.

There are more than one arguments regarding the motives which led to the January 1996 crisis.

Its however clear that Turkey created the crisis over Imia rocky islands seeking specific benefits. Trying to take Turks’ mind off the internal problems, the then Ciller government wanted to change the “status quo” in the area, questioning in practice Greece’s dominance in eastern Aegean.

That continues to be the major issue in Greek-Turkish relations and, despite Turkey’s obligations towards its E.U. course, nobody could assure that a new Imia crisis will not happen sometime in the future.

In 1996, Ankara failed to drag Simitis’ government in bilateral negotiations regarding the status of Imia (which was a major aim) but succeeded to put on the map the theory of “grey zones”.

Taking advantage from the fact that there is not a Greek-Turkish official agreement which delimitate the sea borders in the Dodecanese, Turkey’s leadership set up a theory: that the islands which aren’t nominally included in the signed international treaties do not belong to Greece, but come under a questionable legal status.

This argument consists the basis of the unfounded “grey zones” policy.

However, it intentionally ignores International law.

Firstly, the 1923 Treaty of Laussane limited Turkey’s sovereignty – except from Imvros, Tenedos and Lagouses – exclusively over the islands being within three-mile limit off its coast. More specifically, according to article 16 of the above Treaty, Turkey “renounces all rights and title whatsoever” over the islands which do not belong to its territory.

Secondly, in January 1932, the Italian-Turkish Treaty precisely delimitated the maritime frontier between Castelorizo island and the eastern Turkish coast.

A supplementary agreement (protocol), which was signed on December of the same year, makes a clear reference to the rocky island of Imia as part of Italy.

The Dodecanese islands, as well as the adjecent islets, were ceded by Italy to Greece in the 1947 Paris Treaty – therefore, since then Imia consist property of Greece as long as under International law the successor country assumes all rights and obligations that have been established by previous international treaties (1923, 1932).

The 1996 Imia incident proved that Greece has three major choices in order to resolve the
“grey zones” gordian knot created by Turkey.

The first one is to accept Ankara’s desire for direct bilateral dialogue, which in fact consists an “anatolian bazaar”.

It would be in the best interests of Turkey to get Greece into a give-and-take negotiation over eastern Aegean, including sovereignty over islets and sharing of territorial waters.

However, its clear that Greece can keep the right to expand its territorial waters to 12 miles (from today’s 6 miles) and cannot put in bazaar’s negotiations the actual validity of International Treaties.

The second one is to get in a fruitless military competition with Turkey and to respond to bravado provocative threats of the other side.

In 1996 this choice was unwisely proposed by those who see Foreign Policy through the prism of costless ultra-nationalism and populist rhetoric.

But, apart from the negative economic reverberation (5-6 percent of Greece’s annual budget goes to weaponry), this pathway leads again to bilateral negotiations and puts in danger the present status quo of Aegean.

If Costas Simitis had decided to respond militarily to Turkey’s provocation, in January 1996, the cost for the country would be double and perhaps irreversible.

Therefore, a third choice remains.

The appeal to the Hague International Court of Justice which, in accordance with the standing International law, will settle three disputes: the territorial waters (since 1994, the “common law” of the Sea gives the right to Greece to expand its borders to 12 miles), the continental shelf issue and the matter of eastern Aegean islands’ demilitarization.

Such a decision by the International Court of Justice would be obligating for Ankara, especially when Turkey is under Brussels’ observation regarding its E.U. course. What is sure is that we don’t want another Imia incident and its about time to drag the opportunity and put an end to the “grey stories” of Turkish nationalism.