Turkey welcomes Egypt’s stance on contentious maritime border

Turkish-Egyptian relations have always had their ups and downs. The tensions increased after Mohammed Morsi was ousted in 2013 and Abdel Fattah El-Sisi came to power. It is common knowledge that Turkey’s attitude was motivated more by its bias toward the Muslim Brotherhood than a democratically elected government.

The ups and downs continued in May, when an Egyptian journalist ventured to write an article intimating that it was time for Turkey and Egypt to normalize their relations. A few days later, the Egyptian authorities disowned the idea.

The fluctuations reached another level when Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan said this month that the intelligence agencies of the two countries had maintained contacts and would continue to do so. Turkey’s presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin last week brought further clarification by expressing his wish that Egypt could play a positive role in Libya. He said: “We will be pleased if Egypt, Qatar, Germany, Russia and Italy could contribute to the political consultations.” We can assume that he would not have said so without Erdogan’s full consent.

It is only natural for the intelligence agencies of these two important countries in the Middle East to maintain contact, especially when they don’t have resident ambassadors in each other’s capital.

A more tangible step was made on this subject this month, as Egypt came up with a new attitude when it was demarcating its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) with Greece. This may have escaped the attention of many observers, but it was significant for Turkey. When Greece and Egypt agreed on the line separating their EEZs, Cairo stopped short of defining the line that would separate Turkey and Egypt’s EEZs.

This is important for Turkey because it is part of another contention on whether Ankara and Cairo have common maritime borders in the Mediterranean. Greece claims that the EEZ of its Kastellorizo island prevents Turkey’s EEZ from reaching the Egyptian EEZ. Cairo agreed to mark the western part of the Greece-Egypt EEZ, but chose to keep silent on the demarcation of the eastern half because it did not want to become party to a contentious issue between Turkey and Greece.

This may have escaped the attention of many observers, but it was significant for Turkey.

Yasar Yakis

Egypt did not opt for this attitude only to please Turkey. It is more logical to presume that it did so because the Greek approach on this subject was causing the loss of several hundred thousand square kilometers of EEZ.

Cairo’s silence on this issue was enthusiastically welcomed in the Turkish media because it was perceived as a rejection of Greece’s claims regarding Kastellorizo on the one hand and a goodwill gesture to Turkey for thawing their bilateral relations on the other.

The Kastellorizo issue is likely to remain on the agenda for some time. Basically, it is a question of whether this island should be allowed to have its own EEZ. As I have mentioned in previous articles, Kastellorizo is a tiny island of just 7.3 square km, inhabited by about 400 people. It is 1.8 km from Turkey’s coast and more than 500 km from mainland Greece. According to the Greek assumption, this tiny island creates an EEZ in the Eastern Mediterranean 4,000 times bigger than its own land area.

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) contains provisions that may justify Greece’s thesis. For instance, article 121, paragraph 3, provides that: “Rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf.” Greece concludes from such provisions that inhabited islands should automatically be entitled to have an EEZ. This approach is misleading because the UNCLOS contains other provisions that negate Greece’s approach. For instance, paragraph 10 of article 76 provides: “The provisions of this article are without prejudice to the question of delimitation of the continental shelf between States with opposite or adjacent coasts.” In other words, Greece’s first step had to be a fair negotiation with Turkey to delineate its EEZ. This could not be done, partly because of the maximalist claims of both sides.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has issued several verdicts that contradict Greece’s approach. One of them was its verdict on the Channel Islands. There are three main islands in the English Channel archipelago — Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney — surrounded by minor islets and rocks. Jersey is located about 24 km from France and 146 km from the British coast. The ICJ decided that Jersey should not be allowed to have an EEZ or a continental shelf. Instead, its maritime jurisdiction area is confined to 22 km of territorial waters. The Jersey example proves the incongruity of Greece’s claim to allow Kastellorizo to have its own continental shelf — and Egypt’s attitude reconfirms it. Whether this will lead to a thaw in Turkish-Egyptian relations is difficult to tell.

• Yasar Yakis is a former foreign minister of Turkey and founding member of the ruling AK Party. Twitter: @yakis_yasar