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After Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, the Greeks are worried that another war may be drawing close in the Aegean.
Greek opposition parties have joined the government in approving the country’s biggest naval modernisation in 20 years.
Over the next four years, Greece will spend 2.26bn euros ($2.53bn) buying three Belharra frigates built by France’s Naval Group, considered state of the art in the Western arsenal.
Female politicians forced to flee following the Taliban takeover arrive in Greece as they plan to relocate to the West.
When Taliban fighters ransacked Shagufa Noorzai’s home on August 29, she was not there.
The member of parliament from Helmand province had gone into hiding following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban on August 15, as US and NATO troops were withdrawing from the country after 20 years of war.
“I was in a washroom without a window for 15 days,” she told Al Jazeera. “Even my family didn’t know where I was … The Taliban told my father, ‘tell her to come out of hiding and we will work with her’.”
Homa Ahmadi, who represented Logar province in parliament three times, said “They [the Taliban] are going to kill people who were working in government and they will do it quietly.”
“They break into people’s homes to show people that they have no rights, and to create fear that they can take whatever they want.”
Day after retaking Afghanistan, the Taliban announced a “general amnesty” for government workers, but reports have emerged of Taliban fighters killing members of ethnic Hazara men and torturing journalists. However, top Taliban leadership has reiterated that they will not target their opponents.
Noorzai and Ahmadi are among more than a dozen female MPs and their families who have arrived in Athens, the Greek capital, after being evacuated from Afghanistan in the past several weeks with the help of two non-governmental organisations, Melissa Network and Human Rights 360.
“We created a list of 150 women of influence who were mostly on death lists, who were facing tremendous risks and were willing to take any risk in the process of accessing the airport or exiting the country,” says Melissa co-founder Nadina Christopoulou.
“What they kept telling us before the withdrawal of US troops was [that] going back home means facing certain death.”
Greek diplomatic sources put the figure of evacuees at 177 so far, which includes female lawyers and judges arriving by chartered flight this month.
Restrictive government decisions have cast thousands of refugees out of protective support services and are creating a hunger crisis, aid groups say.
Just under 18,000 refugees live in camps on the Greek mainland. More than half – 60 percent according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), a United Nations body – have no access to food services or cash handouts. Almost half are children.
That is because last September, the government restricted services to those who are in the process of applying for asylum. Most camp residents do not fit that description.
Some have been granted asylum, and they are entitled to benefits for only 30 days after that decision.
Benefits used to be extended for six months, to support people navigating employment prospects and premises. The government cut that period down in March last year.
Asadullah Sadighi and his 16-year-old daughter, Afghans living in Ritsona camp, a former air force radar base 90km north of Athens, are in this category.
Sadighi told Al Jazeera: “When they give us asylum they don’t give us food or cash any more, and leave us to fend for ourselves. They take away our protection completely.
Turkish Cypriot foreign minister tells Al Jazeera he sees little hope for negotiations, but others see a path forward.
Weeks after United Nations-led talks in April failed to resuscitate negotiations to reunify Cyprus, the Turkish Cypriot foreign minister has told Al Jazeera that the UN process is dead.
“There will not be negotiations so long as the Greek Cypriots are treated as if they are the Republic of Cyprus and so long as the Turkish Cypriots are treated as if we are nothing other than a mere community of that Republic,” Tahsin Ertugruloglu told Al Jazeera.
“Equal international status is a must.”
Turkish Cypriots declared Northern Cyprus a Turkish republic in 1983, giving it the formal title of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), but the UN Security Council immediately denounced it as “invalid” and “incompatible with the 1960 Treaty” that established Cyprus’ independence from Britain.
As a result, only Turkey recognises it.
The internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus is where Greek Cypriots live.
UN resolutions have since called on the two sides to form a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation.
Turkish-Cypriot President Ersin Tatar came to power last October pronouncing UN talks a failure and promising a two-state solution.
Yet federation was originally an idea of the Turkish Cypriots, who declared a federated state in 1975, months after a Greek coup attempt in Nicosia triggered a Turkish invasion.
Turkey still occupies the northern third of the island, saying it needs to protect its ethnic minority.
Inter-communal clashes had already segregated the two communities in 1964.
“We established the Turkish-Cypriot federated state with the expectation that the Greek Cypriots would establish their federated state,” said Ertugruloglu.
“But Greek Cypriots have no reason to accept this kind of a settlement because they are accepted by the world as the Republic of Cyprus on their own, and as such, they are able to enjoy the benefits of recognition by themselves … Why should they ever accept anything less than that?”
Greece on Thursday ratified a mutual defence pact with France, the first between two NATO members.
The two countries are already bound to help each other from an attack originating outside the alliance. But the Strategic Partnership on Defence and Security for the first time joins two NATO members to support one another from an attack originating inside the alliance.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis hailed the agreement as the cornerstone of an independent European defence policy.
“The defence of European interests in the Mediterranean now acquires new substance,” Mitsotakis told parliament. “If attacked, our country will have at its side the most powerful military on the continent, the sole European nuclear power.”
Article 2 of the Partnership states that the pair will assist each other “with all the means at their disposal, in the event that armed force is needed, if they both ascertain that an attack is taking place against the territory of either.”
The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton and The Greek Revolution: 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe by Mark Mazower reviewed. Review by John Psaropoulos
We are traveling through a shower of Greek anniversaries, triumphant and calamitous. Last year marked the 25th centenary of the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC, when 300 Greek warships defeated a Persian armada four times larger and ended the Persian empire’s expansion into Europe. This year marks the bicentenary of the beginning of the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman empire in 1821, which resulted in the first European nation-state to be founded on the Enlightenment values of the American Constitution.
Next year will mark the centenary of Greece’s defeat in Asia Minor in 1922, which ended the modern Greek state’s aspirations to absorb all the lands where Greeks lived and had lived since antiquity, an event still referred to as ‘the catastrophe’. And 2023 will see the centenary of the Treaty of Lausanne, which organized the first mass exchange of populations in modern times, forcing Christians to leave Turkey and Muslims to leave Greece.
In The Greeks: A Global History, Roderick Beaton encompasses the entire story, beginning with the Minoans whose civilization ended 3,200 years ago. He defines as Greek anyone who spoke and wrote Greek, appropriately because language was the core criterion by which the Greeks defined themselves over the centuries. Much else about them was mutable. At various times they called themselves Achaeans, Hellenes and Romans. The boundaries of Greek territory have waxed and waned, but the nation has been boundless, establishing itself everywhere on the globe.
Unlike other long-lived civilizations, when the Greeks did achieve self-determination they experimented with different political systems: monarchy, tyranny, oligarchy and democracy are all Greek words. They were the subjects of two empires and ruled at least three. They switched religious allegiance too, from the Olympian gods to Christianity.
Workers are still laying down asphalt in the high-security end of the camp where deportees will be held, but the overall shape of a new, 15-hectare (37-acre) refugee reception centre on the Greek island of Samos is clear.
A large, central area contains neighbourhoods of colour-coded mobile housing units for Arabic speakers (green), Afghans (blue) and people of African origin (red).
There are shared play areas for football, basketball and volleyball. A purple area is set aside for COVID-19 quarantine. A separate section will process new arrivals.
Some of the 350 asylum seekers bussed here earlier this week were grateful to be moved from an old camp in Samos’ main town of Vathy, which is set to be bulldozed.
Built for 700 people, it had ended up housing 9,000.
People arriving from Turkey, 1.5km (just under a mile) away across the Aegean Sea, had built a shanty town of tarpaulin huts nailed onto frames of salvaged lumber.
Earlier this year Greek Olympic gold medalist Sofia Bekatorou came forward and testified that she was sexually assaulted as a 21-year-old in 1998 by a sports official. Since then, a wave of #MeToo allegations have swept through Greece.
John Psaropoulos, an independent journalist and Al Jazeera’s southeast Europe correspondent, joins us from Athens to talk about his interview with Sofia Bekatorou, the #MeToo movement in Greece, and how it’s impacting the country’s politics.
