NATO Overcomes Greek-Turkish Tension To Set Terms Of Aegean Mission

NATO is to participate in worldwide efforts to cut the lines of illegal trafficking and illegal migration across the Aegean Sea, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a statement Thursday.

“Our ships will be providing information to the coastguards and other national authorities of Greece and Turkey”.

Should NATO ships take migrants back to Turkey despite being in European waters, the move effectively seals the aquatic Greek border.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu asked North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to help tackle a crisis in which more than a million refugees arrived in Europe a year ago.

Another sticking point had been what to do with any migrants in distress that North Atlantic Treaty Organisation vessels would be obliged to rescue under the law of the sea.

In a previous address to the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee and its security and defence subcommittee on 23 February, he said the mass migrant crisis sparked by Syria’s five-year-old civil war “is by far the worst since the end of the Second World War” that Europe has experienced. “So NATO has a unique role to play as a platform for co-operation”, he said.

The NATO force will conduct reconnaissance, monitoring and surveillance to provide information to Greece, Turkey and the EU’s border agency Frontex so that they – not the alliance – can deal with the traffickers.

“In case of rescue of persons coming via Turkey, they will be taken back to Turkey“, Stoltenberg said without mentioning the particulars if refugees are rescued in Greek waters.

The NATO mission to control migrant traffickers in the Aegean could be launched on Friday after planning now underway at NATO is complete, German defence ministry spokesman Michael Henjes said on Wednesday.

The Minister of Shipping Theodoros Dritsas commented that many aspects of the agreement have not yet been clarified, particularly in technical matters such as the identification and supervision of illegal crossings.