Turkey making regional ‘comeback’

Turkey is making a regional “comeback” and has gained an enhanced role through the recently signed Mecca Agreement, international affairs expert Constantinos Filis said on Tuesday, warning that Ankara is increasingly confident of its position in the region and towards Greece and Cyprus. Speaking to the Cyprus News Agency, professor at the American College of Greece and director of the Institute of Global Affairs, Filis said Turkey was also deeply troubled by cooperation between Cyprus, Greece and Israel and would like to disrupt it. Asked about the mutual defence agreement recently signed in Mecca by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, Filis described it as the first attempt by states in the Middle East to join forces within the new regional security environment taking shape. Turkey’s participation, he said, gives Ankara an increased regional role and, in turn, “even greater confidence regarding its position in the region and towards Greece and Cyprus”. Filis also pointed to Turkey’s efforts to rebuild its relationship with Egypt, noting that only a few years ago Ankara had found itself largely marginalised in the Eastern Mediterranean, with the controversial Turkey-Libya maritime agreement as its main regional foothold. “Today, Turkey has restored its relationship with Egypt to a significant degree,” he said. At the same time, Syria, which under Bashar al-Assad had been hostile towards Ankara, has moved closer to Turkey, while Ankara is also seeking closer relations with Lebanon. Filis noted that Lebanon signed an agreement with Cyprus on the delimitation of their exclusive economic zones several months ago, although the domestic situation in Lebanon remains unstable. “Therefore, Turkey is making a comeback in the region,” he said. According to Filis, the principal obstacles to Turkey pursuing its revisionist regional agenda are Greece and Cyprus, followed to a lesser extent by Israel. “Turkey sees cooperation between Cyprus, Greece and Israel which deeply troubles it and which it would like, in some way, to break apart. It has not managed to do so,” he said. Meanwhile speaking to the Cyprus Mail about the Mecca joint defence agreement, area studies analyst and research fellow at the Institute of International Relations (IDIS) in Athens Ilya Roubanis said its significance for Cyprus lies less in the prospect of a new military alliance and more in what it reveals about an increasingly polarised region. Asked how these regional developments could affect efforts to resolve the Cyprus problem, Filis described Cyprus and Greek-Turkish relations as “communicating vessels”, with developments in one inevitably affecting the other. “If relations between Greece and Turkey are calm, which they cannot [consistently] be because of Turkish revisionism, but during periods when they are calm, this can have a positive effect on the Cyprus problem,” he said. “When Greece-Turkey relations are going through a bad period, this negatively affects the Cyprus problem.” The relationship also works in the opposite direction, he added. A genuine prospect for a Cyprus settlement could have a positive effect on Greek-Turkish relations, while the absence of such a prospect either has no impact or worsens relations between Athens and Ankara.