Regional Studies Center

Regional Studies Center held a seminar entitled (The Problem of Determining Territorial Waters between Turkey and Greece in the Aegean Sea) by Mr. Waleed Mahmood Ahmad, the researcher at the Department of Political and Strategic Studies, in the presence of the Center’s researchers on Wednesday, November 4, 2020.
The researcher said that his research dealt with the disputes between the two countries on the rights of territorial waters, as stipulated in the relevant international agreements. As the chronic problem of these differences derives its vitality from diminishing hopes for a solution that eliminates the tensions resulting from the aforementioned problems that appear from time to time in the form of threats by both sides accompanied sometimes by some air or sea provocations in which their military units share, at other times, diplomatic battles begin in frantic attempts to extract rights or gains from one side at the expense of the other; what is striking that the Greek side is always fortified with Europe to include it in the political scene. The latter finds itself embarrassed because it is aware of the reality of the Turkish demands in exchange for the commitment imposed on it historically, politically, and culturally towards the Greek heritage, and thus it is forced to enter the line of crises developed from the above differences.
The researcher added that the research aims to investigate the causes of these problems and whether the agreements imposed by the victors in World War I on Turkey, the curtailment of its land and sea rights, and the handing over the keys to Greece to confront Turkey’s inroads in the future are the cause of these differences, or does the matter have its historical repercussions that are governed by the contradictions of the Ottoman-Greek ethnicities and races, or perhaps the whole matter is a mixture of the two factors mentioned above.