Pompeo to back Greece amid tension with Turkey
Ankara cracks down on opposition
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will visit Greece next week in a show of support following high tensions in the Mediterranean with Turkey, the State Department has announced.
In his second trip to Greece in less than a year, Pompeo will go both to the northern city of Thessaloniki and the southern island of Crete, where he will meet with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
Pompeo will “renew our shared commitment to advance security, peace and prosperity in the Eastern Mediterranean and celebrate the strongest US-Greek relationship in decades,” the State Department said. In Crete, he will visit the NATO base at Souda Bay “to underscore the strong US security partnership with NATO ally Greece,” it said. Tensions flared last month when Turkey sent a vessel backed by military frigates to hunt for oil and gas reserves in waters also claimed by Greece. Greece responded with naval exercises as a warning and has enjoyed especially vocal backing from France. Pompeo earlier this month also discussed the row on a visit to Cyprus, the majority-Greek island whose northern third is occupied by Turkey. Meanwhile, Turkish authorities on Friday ordered the arrest of 82 dissident politicians, women’s rights defenders, and civil society activists in connection with violent protests six years ago.
Current and former members of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), were among those being rounded up over demonstrations in 2014 against the Daesh siege of the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani.
At the time of the protests, in which 37 people died, Ankara blamed the HDP for inciting demonstrators to take to the streets.
The move has met with regional and international criticism with Turkish government opponents claiming the arrests were politically motivated and a follow-up to the jailing four years ago of the party’s former co-chairs Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yuksekdag.
Emma Sinclair-Webb, the director of Human Rights Watch Turkey, told Arab News that the only pretext Ankara had found for keeping Demirtas locked up was an old investigation file. “It focuses on the Oct. 6 to 8,
2014 violent protests in the southeast and attempts to pin responsibility on Demirtas and the HDP, as if the party could have foreseen the violence that would ensue,” she said.
Experts pointed out that the government’s latest action was designed to further weaken the HDP ahead of any snap elections and provoke division among opposition groups over the arrests.
Amnesty International Turkey campaigner, Milena Buyum, told Arab News: “Detaining individuals who could simply be called to make statements in highly mediatized dawn raids undermines their right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence.”