JOURNALIST: Good morning, Minister.
G. KATROUGALOS: Good morning to you and your listeners.
JOURNALIST: On Thursday and Friday, we shall have the two-day EU Summit on Brexit, but you will most likely not be in Brussels. I have learned that you will be going to Washington.
G. KATROUGALOS: Precisely. I am leaving at noon for America. I shall have meetings there related also to the Cyprus issue, with the new Special Envoy of the Secretary General, Ms Lute. I will meet with Mr Nimetz and, on the following day, we have an important event, the so-called Strategic Dialogue, which is a procedure with the US, it is a procedure that shows the upgrading of our relations with that country. The US invites specific, selected countries to such a dialogue, those which they consider are able to play a role in the stability and security in the region.
JOURNALIST: The pro-American ones, in other words?
G. KATROUGALOS: Those with which they have coinciding interests. If something were to characterise Greek-American relations recently, this truly is their upgrading as well as the fact that this upgrade is taking place through relations of equality. In other words, we don’t have attitudes like we did in the past along the lines of “Mr Ambassador, here is your army”...
JOURNALIST: Okay now, but Pyatt acts like the country is his.
G. KATROUGALOS: No, that is not true. He is a very active ambassador, but he has never displayed signs of arrogance, which we had in the past. Every ambassador promotes the interests of their country. Nothing reprehensible in that. But his attitude is not such, I believe, to justify what you are saying, and much less the substance of his actions.
JOURNALIST: Anyway, we shall now see how things will go with the Americans. But you said that you will see Nimetz. With that you have aroused our interest, Minister. What is going on with the Skopje issue, with the Prespa Agreement? Will you tell Mr Nimetz to intervene further with Zaev? Will you request an interpretative statement, some additional protocols or anything else related to that issue which will not cause issues with regard to the Macedonian language and all that which Mr Zaev says?
G. KATROUGALOS: The message has been sent, and in numerous ways indeed. And not just by me. I shall tell you my actions. I have successively raised the issue with the Secretary General of NATO, Mr Stoltenberg, with Ms Mogherini, the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy / Vice-President of the Commission, as is her formal title, and at the Meetings of Foreign Ministers of NATO and the European Union. And the message is clear, that we must respect the spirit and the letter of the Prespa Agreement, and that statements raising doubt on this content must be avoided. The other side has got the message. You did notice that corrective statements were made with regard to everything that was heard.
JOURNALIST: Zaev came out yesterday and said that there will be no additional interpretative statement, or any other annex to accompany the Agreement. What was the bothersome part, Mr Katrougalos, about which we requested refutation?
G. KATROUGALOS: In the first statement by Mr Zaev, the one before Parliament, it was clear that the phrasing he chose could stir things up as regards “Aegean Macedonians” etc. And this confusion is not permissible when we have a text which expressly stipulates that there is an end to the irredentism, and that no country has the right to interfere any longer in the internal matters of any other country. And of course, no side must make statements that are susceptible to misinterpretation.
JOURNALIST: And if the Skopjans continue, what will you do? Because I hear Mr Kammenos - he is out of line you are bound to tell me - saying that the Prespa Agreement is dead and the Skopjans are adhering to the propaganda of Tito and Mussolini.
G. KATROUGALOS: The Independent Greeks have had a position which from the beginning....
JOURNALIST: Okay but is it the governing opposition? What is it, a partner in the government, so that you have to have the same stance?
G. KATROUGALOS: About this issue, they indeed do have a different stance, but as they have stated, they go along with the government on everything else.
JOURNALIST: They have said that they will topple the government, for example Mr Katsikis has said that the governing majority will be gone, in other words the governing majority will be lost.
G. KATROUGALOS: Their actions, their choice of actions, is clearly under their own control, but I assure you there is no chance neither of the governing majority to be lost nor for the Prespa Agreement not to be passed.
JOURNALIST: Tell us about that, because Potami seems to have an ambiguous position; one day it's this, the other day that.
G. KATROUGALOS: I too had that impression until the day before yesterday. Yesterday’s statements, I believe, affirm my previous position. Because, truth be told, the Agreement has not changed, the letter of the agreement has remained the same. What we are trying to conserve now is its spirit. It is logical for all of us to ensure this, because the issue is not only for the Agreement to be ratified, the issue is for it to be implemented. And its implementation clearly presupposes that we respect it.
JOURNALIST: So you believe that Potami will vote in the end.
G. KATROUGALOS: That's what I gather from the latest statements. Because I repeat, support of the initial agreement by 4 out of 6 Potami MPs to be exact, two had stated from the beginning that they disagree. I don’t see the reason for this to change. Because, I repeat, nothing has changed in the letter of the Prespa Agreement and, to date, the constitutional revision is being concluded exactly as they had promised they would do.
JOURNALIST: Are you not worried that Theodorakis will sort things out with Mitsotakis and thus that their stance will change, as the Prime Minister's office is allowing for it be insinuated.
G. KATROUGALOS: The choices of Potami with regard to its political collaborations is again something that is completely up to them, to the total discretion of that party. But I believe that it has commitments, again related to its political reliability. Obviously, no other type of commitments exist in the policy as regards to the Prespa Agreement, from the initial statements
JOURNALIST: Can I ask something: You were with Alexis Tsipras in Moscow, on the visit that took place last week. How did things go? One truly asks oneself what the goal of that trip was. For them to say publicly, for President Putin to say, “The decision to expel the Russian diplomats was nonsense,” and for the Greek Prime Minister to say “It was simply a dark cloud on an otherwise sunny relationship?”
G. KATROUGALOS: The expulsion of the diplomats was not a central element of the talks, under any circumstances. The Prime Minister told us clearly that we make the decisions, that as long as he is Prime Minister at least, no one else influences Greece’s decisions on issues of foreign policy. But he felt, along with President Putin, that it is an isolated event in our generally good relations. And the goal of the visit was precisely to rekindle these relations, to provide prospects, especially for cooperation in the economic sector, and in what we call relations between peoples. And this is why it was decided for next year to be the “Year of Language and Culture” for us and for Russia, clearly related to Greek culture and, for Greece, related to Russian culture.
JOURNALIST: In other words now you are saying that no country influences Greece's foreign policy. In the US, where you will be travelling now, you will hold talks there with the head of the State Department, with Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State in other words, with whom we have such a good relationship....
G. KATROUGALOS: And with the Security Advisor, Mr Bolton.
JOURNALIST: Don’t the US influence Greece in any way?
G. KATROUGALOS: That is what I was trying to say earlier, that when you have relations of parity, when in other words there is no overlord...
JOURNALIST: Does anyone have balanced relations with the US?
G. KATROUGALOS: Good balance does not depend on size. For example, we want to have balanced relations with our neighbouring country, the fYROM, and we are similar in terms of size and might, which is not the case with the US. And when reciprocal respect reigns in the relations between countries, and respect of International Law, size certainly is important, but it does not necessarily lead to unbalanced relations, especially relations of subservience.
JOURNALIST: And one last thing about Katsifas, because people are asking. Is there any response by the Albanian Authorities, as to how Konstantinos Katsifas was murdered?
G. KATROUGALOS: No, and this is one of the issues that I raise publicly also -without being critical- that we are awaiting the results of the investigation. This is one of the things we are requesting. Indeed, in a recent statement by a Spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this issue was raised. We wish to have good relations with Albania. In fact, the negotiations between us under Nikos Kotzias have been advanced, almost to their final stage. But as I have said many times, for us, a condition for the Albania's European perspective is for it to meet all the obligations that it has towards the European Union, and to fully safeguard, as is its European obligation, I repeat, the rights of our Minority there. Abundant light must be shed on the issue of Katsifas.
December 11, 2018