Turkish president warns Greece to enter talks over disputed Mediterranean Sea claims or face ‘painful experiences’.3 hours ago
![Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stressed that Turkey is 'ready for every eventuality and result' [Isa Terli/Anadolu Agency]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2020/9/5/c50f6718820a4bb89e2f74627a5e470f_18.jpg "Erdogan raises rhetoric in Greece standoff in Mediterranean")
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned Greece to enter talks over disputed eastern Mediterranean territorial claims or face the consequences.
“They’re either going to understand the language of politics and diplomacy, or in the field with painful experiences,” he said on Saturday at a hospital’s opening ceremony in Istanbul.
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The two NATO allies have been locked for weeks in a tense standoff in the eastern Mediterranean, where Turkey is prospecting the seabed for energy reserves in an area Greece claims as its own continental shelf.
Cyprus has also accused Turkey of breaching its sovereignty by drilling in their waters. All sides have deployed naval and air forces to assert their competing claims in the region.
“They are going to understand that Turkey has the political, economic and military power to tear up the immoral maps and documents imposed,” Erdogan added, referring to areas marked by Greece and Cyprus as their economic maritime zones.
He said Turkey was “ready for every eventuality and result”.
NATO said this week Greek and Turkish leaders had agreed to take part in technical talks to avoid accidents between their navies.
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But Greece later said it had not agreed to the talks, leading to accusations from Turkey that the European Union country was shunning dialogue.null
Tanks to the border?
On Saturday, a Turkish news report said Ankara redeployed armoured personnel carriers from the Syrian border to the one it shares with Greece.
The Cumhuriyet newspaper said 40 tanks were being transported from the Syrian border to Edirne in northwest Turkey and carried photographs of armoured vehicles loaded on trucks.
A military official speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations said the deployment was a regular movement of forces and unconnected to tension with Greece.
Al Jazeera’s Stefanie Dekker, reporting from Istanbul, said officials have only said, “This is within the planned activity, the responsibility of the second army, [which is] responsible for the areas of Syria, Iraq and Iran.”
If the convoy is indeed heading to the border with Greece, then it is a part of the “diplomatic military arm wrestling in what is a tense situation between the two countries”, Dekker said.
“We just heard from Turkey’s president that … they won’t hesitate even going to a full-on military confrontation when it comes to defending what they say are their legitimate rights.”
Al Jazeera’s John Psaropoulos, reporting from Athens, said he does not believe the Greeks are concerned about the narrow land border they share with Turkey, as they have 1,300 tanks in their arsenal, most of which are “parked right there in the 130-kilometre-long stretch”.
INSIDE STORY: Will Greece and Turkey fight over energy? (24:31)
“There is overwhelming armour opposite the Turkish border and that’s the only part of the Greek-Turkish theatre that the Greeks feel confident about,” Psaropoulos said.
“What they’re less confident about is the vast swath of the Aegean sea and now eastern Mediterranean sea.”
He added after eight years of recession and austerity measures imposed by its eurozone partners, Greece has cut its defence budget by about half, now amounting to roughly 3 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP).
“The Greeks have traditionally spent very highly on defence. They are now unable to keep up with Turkey, which has almost triple the defence budget of Greece,” Psaropoulos said.
Practicing dogfights
Turkey on August 10 deployed the Oruc Reis research vessel and an escorting flotilla of warships to the waters between Cyprus and the Greek islands of Kastellorizo and Crete. The vessel’s stay in the contested waters has been extended three times.
Greece responded by staging naval exercises with several EU allies and the United Arab Emirates, not far from smaller manoeuvres Turkey conducted between Cyprus and Crete last week.
Ankara said it has every right to prospect the region and accuses Athens of trying to grab an unfair share of maritime resources.
Simulated dogfights between Greek and Turkish fighter pilots have multiplied over the Aegean Sea and the eastern Mediterranean.
A Turkish and a Greek frigate collided last month, reportedly causing minor damage to the Turkish frigate but no injuries.
Erdogan said Turkey has repeatedly expressed its willingness to come to a just agreement.
“Our word is sincere,” he said. “The problem is those before us disregard our rights and try to situate themselves above us.”
The crisis is the most serious in the two countries’ relations in decades. The neighbours have come to the brink of war three times since the mid-1970s, including once over maritime resources in the Aegean.
Earlier, Ankara announced joint military exercises with northern Cypriot forces from Sunday to September 10. The air, land, and sea drills are held every year.
What’s behind rising tensions in Eastern Mediterranean?
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES
Uproar grows over reports Trump called US war dead ‘losers’
Joe Biden declares Donald Trump ‘unfit’ for presidency as anger grows over media reports he disparaged fallen soldiers.05 Sep 2020 18:10 GMT
US President Donald Trump has come under fire over reports he mocked the country’s war dead as “suckers” and “losers”, with Joe Biden, his main opponent in the upcoming presidential election, declaring him “unfit” for the commander-in-chief role.
Biden’s comments on Friday came as Trump again sought to dismiss as “false” the alleged comments, first reported on by The Atlantic magazine and then by The Associated Press news agency.
Voice cracking, Biden told reporters in Delaware that “you know in your gut” Trump’s comments, if true, are “deplorable”.
“I’ve just never been as disappointed, in my whole career, with a leader that I’ve worked with, president or otherwise,” Biden added. “If the article is true – and it appears to be, based on other things he’s said – it is absolutely damning. It is a disgrace.”
Trump, in the Oval Office, said no apology was necessary, because it was a “fake story”.
The allegations, sourced anonymously, describe multiple offensive comments by the president towards killed and captured US service members during a trip to France in November 2018.
In the morning of a scheduled visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, Trump reportedly told senior staff, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The White House later said the visit was cancelled because foggy weather made the helicopter trip from Paris too risky and a 90-minute drive was deemed infeasible.
The Atlantic also said Trump, in a separate conversation on the same trip, referred to more than 1,800 US soldiers who died during the consequential 1918 battle at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.
Trump backtracks on comments suggesting Americans vote twice (2:31)
Speaking in the Oval Office on Friday, Trump denied ever uttering such comments. “It was a terrible thing that somebody could say the kind of things – and especially to me, ’cause I’ve done more for the military than almost anyone anybody else.”
Later, in a news briefing, Trump suggested the source of the story was his former chief of staff, retired Marine General John Kelly. “It could have been a guy like John Kelly,” Trump told reporters, saying his former top aide “was unable to handle the pressure of this job”.
‘You’re no patriot’
But that denial was met with scepticism, with critics seizing on the media reports to shine a fresh light on Trump’s previous public disparagement of US troops and military families.
That includes his criticism of the late Arizona Senator John McCain, a decorated Navy officer who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain in 2015. He had also said at the time: “I like people who weren’t captured.”
On a call with reporters hosted by the Biden campaign on Friday, Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth lambasted Trump for “belittling the sacrifices of those who have shown more bravery than he’s capable of”.
Duckworth, a retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel who lost both of her legs in the Iraq War, has been a prominent critic of Trump’s handling of military issues. Knocking Trump for allegedly inventing an injury to avoid serving in the Vietnam War, Duckworth said she would “take my wheelchair and my titanium legs over Donald Trump’s supposed bone spurs any day”.
Khizr Khan, whose son, Humayun, was killed in action in Iraq in 2004, joined Duckworth on the call and said Trump’s “life is a testament to selfishness”.
Khan, who drew national attention after criticising Trump during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, added: “Words we say are windows into our souls. So, when Donald Trump calls anyone who places their lives in service of others a loser, we understand Trump’s soul.”
Trump denies systemic racism, pushes ‘law and order’ in Kenosha (7:13)
Veterans also condemned the president’s alleged remarks.
Paul Eaton, a retired major general, in a Twitter video said Trump had shown “disrespect to the military in countless occasions”, adding: “You’re no patriot.”
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VoteVets posted online a video, in which six families of US soldiers who died while on duty criticised Trump, each one declaring their children were not losers or suckers. “You don’t know what it is to sacrifice,” one father said.
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Al Jazeera’s Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Alexandria in the US state of Virginia, said Trump’s alleged comments had been confirmed by multiple news outlets.
“This story isn’t going away, because now, a number of news outlets here in Washington have confirmed the same scope and the same quotes that were in that story. That includes Fox News, which has been the president’s go-to television news network.”
Jordan was referring to reporting by Jennifer Griffin, Fox News’s national security correspondent, who said two former Trump administration officials had confirmed The Atlantic’s reporting.
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‘This never happened’
Trump’s supporters, meanwhile, took to television networks and social media to defend the president, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo telling the programme, Fox and Friends, on Friday that he was with the president for a good part of the trip to France.
“I never heard him use the words that are described in that article,” Pompeo said.
US Defense Secretary Mark Esper issued a statement saying “Trump has the highest respect and admiration for our nation’s military members, veterans and families” and “has fought for greater pay and more funding” for the armed forces.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was the White House press secretary at the time of Trump’s visit, said of The Atlantic report: “I was actually there and one of the people part of the discussion – this never happened.”
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First Lady Melania Trump also defended her husband, issuing a rare public statement, calling Trump’s alleged mockery of US war dead “not true” and blasting The Atlantic’s reliance on anonymous sources.
Mike Pence, the vice president, said he was not in Paris but “it never happened”.
He told CNBC: “American people just roll their eyes at these late-hit, anonymous-source media coming from The Atlantic or anywhere else. It’s just politics as usual.”
Ceelwaaq News 