air traffic control status quo over the Aegean Sea, as approved by ICAO in the 1950s.79 Greece rejected NOTAM 714 as it directly affected the airspace above her islands and in response issued NOTAM 1157, declaring the entire Aegean Flight Information Region (FIR) a ‘dangerous area’. Considerable Athens FIR violations by Turkish Air Force aircraft occurred on 20, 27 March and on 3-4 April 1975. In April 1981, on the eve of discussions between Turkish and Greek FIR specialists, the Turkish Air Force violated the Athens FIR and the Greek national airspace. Eventually, bilateral discussions failed to reach an agreement.80 The Greek MoD assumed that the NOTAM 714 Aegean delimitation showed Turkish strategic intentions. Turkey simply divided the Aegean at roughly the same locations she intended to share the Aegean Sea continental shelf. The perception of linked issues and disputes (i.e. the Greek belief NOTAM 714 had been linked to the Turkish positions on the continental shelf) had prevailed within the MoD and the echelons of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1974.81
Moreover, Turkey did not accept the claim (incorporated in a declaration in 1931 which had not been challenged until 1974) that Greek airspace extended 10 nautical miles (nm) from each island’s coast. The Greek territorial waters were six miles off the coast and Athens had retained the right to extend them to 12 miles (according to the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention). In the 1980s, 1992 and in 1997 Ankara declared such a future Greek decision a casus belli, a cause for war. Turkey argued that in such a case the Aegean Sea would be turned into a ‘Greek lake,’ and the Turkish fleet would need to pass through Greek territorial waters in order to reach the high seas and the Aegean international sea corridors.82 Athens was irritated by the Turkish declaration pertaining to a threat of war and to the challenge of a legal right granted by the codification of customary International Law. The Greek military took this declaration as an unequivocal message of hostile intentions.83 The Turkish desire to divide the Aegean in half was considered for political reasons, while the Greek argument had been grounded on a legal basis. Turkish generals argued about the need for Turkish lebensraum and a ‘security zone’ in the Aegean while NATO considered the USSR as its primary threat.84 The term lebensraum is rather emotive to Western readers who may not view the Turkish foreign policy through this spectrum. Key Greek politicians and officers often referred to Ankara’s expansionist intentions to revise the Aegean status quo as a ‘lebensraum concept’, especially after the invasion of Cyprus and the casus belli declarations.85
Issues of the air and sea borders were concerned with the dispute over NATO operational command of the Aegean Sea. Until 1974, Athens had retained international airspace control over the Aegean. After the invasion of Cyprus, the Karamanlis administration decided to withdraw Greece from the military wing of the Alliance in protest of NATO’s failure to intervene. Karamanlis’s move was of a political nature but caused unpredicted operational problems for the MoD and Greek diplomacy. After the Greek withdrawal, Turkey sought to be assigned NATO operational control of the Aegean and thus challenge Greek operational rights (not sovereign rights) over the Aegean Sea and airspace. In October 1975, Greece decided to rejoin NATO. However Ankara had exercised a veto, rejecting the pre-1974 command and control status quo which favoured Greece.
Greece would not accept NATO operational control over any part of her territory (land, sea, islands and the sea/land corridors) when the NATO commander was not located at a Greek/NATO base and was not a Greek officer. Athens had previously been involved in a dispute with Brussels regarding the formation of the Alliance air headquarters because NATO sought to establish them first and then to decide on their operational responsibilities. Since 1970, the Americans had planned to establish a ‘NATO task force concept’ with no rigid operational sections for the local headquarters and promoting a ‘commanding flexibility’ during a future war with Warsaw Pact forces. However the Greek military understood that should this concept be implemented, Turkey would have influence over the defence of Greek sovereign territories.86
Greece and Turkey, in particular, strongly disagreed about the operational rights over the island of Lemnos (Northern Aegean, Greece). In 1977, the upgrading of radar capabilities at a Lemnos base was discussed at NATO level. Initially, the upgrade was considered a financial issue, but later became a military one because NATO planners sought to undertake military exercises around the area. Since the mid 1960s, Turkey had attempted to veto NATO exercises in the Aegean islands. At first, this did not cause concern to Athens because there was no challenge to Greek sovereign rights and because no oil deposits had been discovered in the seabed. Eventually, after the invasion of Cyprus, Athens began to interpret all Turkish actions as suspicious. In 1980, after three years of discussions, Joseph Luns, the Secretary General of NATO, rejected Greece’s request for financial support in the upgrade of the Lemnos radar. Contrary to Turkish arguments, Greece reiterated that the Montreux Treaty (1936) substituted the relevant article in the Lausanne Treaty (1923) regarding the militarisation of the Eastern Aegean islands for self-defence. Therefore, Athens retained the right to have defence installations there and thus receive financial support from NATO.87
On 2nd November 1978, NATO’s legal service accepted the Greek argument on the militarisation of Lemnos as the sovereign right of self-defence. Luns did not accept this advice and created the impression that he favoured the Turkish argument that the arming of Lemnos violated the 1923 Lausanne Treaty. Six years later, in 1984, Luns sent a letter to the president of the NATO Military Committee. His reference to the Lemnos issue was explicit and caused a strong Greek reaction. Luns wrote that ‘the Lemnos problem was a legal-political dispute between two member states. The planners of military exercises shall avoid incorporating Lemnos into NATO exercises’. Eventually, Athens decided against participating in the NATO exercises which did not incorporate Lemnos – where Greek, not NATO funds, maintained the defence installations.88
The former Chief of National Defence General Staff. Air Marshal Nikos Koures, claimed that the US did not approve of zones of operational defence responsibility over the Aegean. Athens did not consider the issue of operational control as operational/technical, but as political. American proposals for a ‘negotiated solution’ were viewed by Greece as a challenge to the existing international rules and status quo over the Aegean and as encouraging Turkish-Greek ‘dialogue’ under the auspices of Washington.89 Greece considered the NATO corridors of power as a ‘battlefield’ where Athens was on the ‘defence’ and Ankara, with ‘the patient strategy of the Middle East culture’, was attempting to manipulate the Alliance policy in favour of Turkish interests. Ankara sought to link the Aegean Sea disputes (FIR, continental shelf, islands demilitarisation, NATO command and control) because the Turkish military intended to alter the status quo in the Aegean.90
In January 1975 Greece proposed that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) should resolve the delimitation of the Aegean continental shelf. Initially, the Turkish Prime Minister Sadi Irmak accepted this offer but pressure from the diplomatic establishment and the opposition leader, former Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, urged him to withdraw his acceptance. When Suleyman Demirel took the Premiership on 6th April 1975, he stated that the dispute could only be resolved through a negotiated settlement. Turkey claimed that the Aegean was a special case and it would be more appropriate to proceed with bilateral discussions rather than seek arbitration through the ICJ.
In April 1976, Greece proposed the signing of a non-aggression pact. On 20th May, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs learned that Turkey was against such a pact and this caused worry about Turkey’s real intentions. As stated earlier, in public statements Ankara raised casus belli on the possibility of extending the Greek territorial sea to 12 nm and avoided addressing the issue of a ‘Greek-Turkish Non-aggression Pact’. In a message to Karamanlis, Prime Minister Demirel argued that a ‘non-aggression pact should come as the culmination of efforts to solve the Greek-Turkish problems peacefully’.91
Scientific research would soon become the pretext for a military standoff. On 29th July 1976, the Turkish research vessel, the Hora (or Sismik I), was dispatched to the Aegean to explore areas of the continental shelf claimed by Greece. Turkey maintained a low military profile with only one warship accompanying the Hora but the earlier (in March 1976) statement of the Turkish Secretary for Power and National Resources alarmed Athens creating the impression of a direct intent to challenge Greek sovereignty.
