Written by Vangelis Georgiou
The buried Fourcade report that recognizes the sovereignty of the Greek islands
In a Nazi prison in southern France in 1942, a beautiful prisoner expected to be subjected to horrific torture. Without delay, she removed all her clothes, leaving her naked, and headed for the window bars. After placing her body between the iron bars, she began to push her body between the bars. Suffocating her pain, the most important female agent of World War II would humiliate the Nazis by escaping "magically." Few in Greece know that this woman, 40 years later, would cause fire and fury in Ankara.
In September 1981, a few months after Greece's entry into the EEC/EU, the front pages of Turkish newspapers would focus on perhaps the most unpleasant news of recent years. Tercüman, in fact, dedicated an entire four-column front page as the European Parliament –not all- applauded the Fourcade Report: MEPs recognized the Greek islands' right to have territorial waters, continental shelf and EEZ!
The European Parliament's vote in favor of the Fourcade report, which defined the boundaries of the EEC's customs territory in the Aegean after Greece's accession, had alarmed the Turks. The report was clear, providing for territorial waters, a continental shelf and an EEZ for the Greek islands, just as Corsica and Sicily, which belong to member states, had.
The paragraphs included left no doubt about this. “We must not forget,” the Report stated, “the fact that the Greek islands, such as the Balearic Islands, Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily, "they are indivisible parts of the continental territories and on the basis of sovereignty they can claim a 12-mile territorial sea, a 200-mile EEZ and a continental shelf."
In the event that there was overlap with areas of another coastal state - as was the case between Greece and Turkey - the principle of equidistance would simply be applied., "which is therefore upgraded to the level of an objective general principle, which will allow a decision to be made between the coastal claimants."
It was the first - and the last? - official EEC/EU document that 100% recognized the legality of the Greek positions in the Greek-Turkish conflict. which arose in the 1970s, when the Turks raised the issue of the continental shelf as an issue to be resolved, whereas before it did not exist. In Turkey, it caused alarm in the press, as the Turks did not want to hear about the islands' right to have their own continental shelf, because this would mean that "Greece can, with the permission of the EEC, close the Aegean to Turkey," wrote journalist Zafer Atay.
In an article in Milliyet, Constitutional Law Professor Mumtaz Soysal argued, among other things, that:
"The purpose of the report does not simply stop at considering the expansion of territorial waters in the Aegean to 12 miles normal, but attributes to it the designation of an "Island State"."
In the unclaimed
Angry Turkish journalist Zafer Atay stressed that the person who prepared and brought this report to the European Parliament was "completely uninformed" about Aegean issues. Unfortunately, for him, the "completely uninformed" The brainchild was the Frenchwoman Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, the 32-year-old woman who escaped naked from Nazi prisons in 1942, 40 years before becoming an MP in Strasbourg.
Marie-Madeleine Fourcade in her office in Paris in 1958-Keystone-France via Getty Images
During World War II, Fourcade had led the espionage of the French Resistance with impressive results.
When she was elected as an MEP in the 1980s, she served as a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Brussels and supported Greece with her report. It had even included that "what applies to the Mediterranean should also apply to the Aegean, where the Greek islands should have a continental shelf that is subject to the equidistance method." This, of course, constituted a casus belli for the Turks.
The Fourcade report is also important because of the personality who proposed it.: A woman, a mother who managed to effectively fight Nazism with unparalleled mastery and methodicality. The work of such a personality constitutes an excellent precedent that responds both to current Turkish statements and to Greek experts who favor the resignation of the 12 nm, some of whom accuse the country of "exceptionalism" and who have exerted influence on the academic and political life of the country.
In my new journalistic job "Greece EEC: Confidential"on Greece's accession to the EEC/EU, -the result of a long-term research in unknown archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs-, I was surprised to "encounter" Fourcade -and not only- her story, her contribution, the reactions of both pro-Turkish MEPs, and the anger of the Turks. But Even today in Greece, both that exhibition and the name of the Frenchwoman remain unclaimed...
source, photos: https://www.huffingtonpost.gr/politiki/gallida-archikataskopos-apanta-se-akar-erntogan-fouktai/
HUFFINGTON POST.GR
By Vangelis Georgiou
