A mid-air collision between jousting Greek and Turkish fighters in disputed airspace over the Aegean Sea on Tuesday threatened to reignite age-old rivalries.
The two planes are believed to have rammed each other, in full view of a passing commercial jetliner. The Turkish pilot, Halil Ozdemir, was rescued by a merchant ship after ejecting, but on Tuesday night emergency services were still searching for the downed pilot of the Greek F-16 jet.
At first both governments tried to play down the collision, which took place over the Aegean island of Karpathos.
The Turkish Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gull, spoke to his Greek counterpart, Dora Bakoyannis, after which both sides stressed the need not to let the incident harm relations. In Ankara a foreign ministry official spoke of the crash as a ”very unfortunate accident”. Military commanders made contact over the incident — testimony, say diplomats, to years of arduous confidence-building measures. But mutual recriminations soon followed.
The Greek statement said the planes collided at 8 000m after the Turkish jets ”violated air-traffic rules”. Greek military officials said the Turkish plane caused the collision by a ”sudden manoeuvre”.
On Tuesday the Turkish military reiterated that the crash had been caused by a Greek fighter interfering in Turkish manoeuvres in international airspace.
”We see them up there fighting it out every day,” said the mayor of Karpathos, Michalis Ioannides. ”At some point something like this was bound to happen,” he said, adding that the islanders had heard a ”huge explosion” when the planes collided.
The crash, the first of its kind involving military jets from the two Nato allies, comes amid renewed Greek-Turkish tensions in the Aegean and Cyprus. Greece claims its air sovereignty extends 16km off its coast, while Turkey recognises only 9,6km, the equivalent of Greece’s territorial waters. Greece scrambles fighter jets almost every day to intercept Turkish warplanes it says are violating its airspace.
But with nationalist sentiment growing in Turkey before presidential and parliamentary elections next year, and tensions mounting on Cyprus following gains by the hard-line Greek Cypriot leader in polls on Sunday, Athens fears the worst.
Although Greece is a leading champion of Turkey’s bid to join the European Union, Greek politicians, including former foreign minister George Papandreou, fear that the crash could portend a new round of hostilities.
”We are really concerned that what happened today will lead to other bigger and smaller incidents,” warned Papandreou, who leads the opposition Socialist Pasok party and was the architect of rapprochement between the two countries. ”Our sovereign rights are non-negotiable, but I worry that with the current policies [of the ruling conservatives] the nation’s interests could be hurt.”
Greece’s ambassador to Turkey, George Yennimatas, was due to deliver a speech in Ankara on Tuesday night, launching a week of Greek cultural activities. The events were expected to go ahead. — Guardian Unlimited Â