Turkey has found a childish way to expand its borders and deliberately delinate its Exclusive Economic Zone. High-ranking officials like the Foreign Minister take a map and draw vertical and horizontal lines according to their liking.
FM Mevlut Cavusoglu presented such a map to the delight of any nationalist Turk inside the country and around the world.
He even went that far to threaten Greece should it dare to search for hydrocarbon East of Crete and several islands of the Dodecanese.
Map below: Marked Green are the Greek and Cypriot EEZs. Marked Red are the new Turkish maritime borders.
Turkey’s alleged new “maritime borders” according to Turkey-Libya Agreement.
Cavusoglu said the Agreement with Libya has created a new Turkish continental shelf and warned against any “unlicensed” hydrocarbon exploration activities in the maritime area Turkey out of the blue and without any international legitimization calls its own.
“No one can conduct this kind of activity in our continental shelf zone without our permission. [If that happens], of course, we will prevent them from doing so, ” Cavusoglu told Turkish Haber TV channel.
During his interview with A Haber, the Turkish minister presented a map showing, according to him, the new boundaries of the Turkish continental shelf, which has expanded significantly under the terms of the agreement Ankara signed with the Libyan National Unity Government (GNA).
#SONDAKİKA
Dışişleri Bakanı @MevlutCavusoglu: Kıta sahanlığımızda izinsiz kimse çalışma yapamaz pic.twitter.com/psYqfX2j71— A Haber (@Ahaber) December 11, 2019
The Foreign Minister assured that Turkey is ready to negotiate with Greece.
“We can sit around a table and discuss. We are not in favor of tensions, but in defense of our rights under international law, ”he said.
Two days earlier, it was the president Recep Tayyip Erdogan who proudly presented a similar map of the so to say new Turkey.
Erdogan’s map was apparently just a draft and did not have the plots for exploration as on the version of his Foreign Minister.
Turkey threatens to invade the Greek Eastern Mediterranean Islands. Both Greece and Turkey are NATO members. Greece is also a member of the European Union. If the EU leaders cared about all their members, they would have adopted a common border policy to protect the Greek borders.