N. KOTZIAS: What are the goals of foreign policy? There are three: to serve the interests of the Greek people and society, to safeguard the country’s territorial integrity, to safeguard its sovereignty and its sovereign rights. This government that I am representing as Foreign Minister is an internationalist and patriotic government and is based on a proactive, independent and multidimensional policy, and this often creates problems in various wings. If we go to Russia, they say we are pro-Russian. If we go to America, they say we are anti-Russian and pro-American. When we go to Germany, they say we made a deal with the Germans. When we go to Palestine, “they sold out the tripartite.” When we go to the tripartite, “they sold out the Arabs.”
Why this confusion? Because they haven’t understood that foreign policy doesn’t need to have either big or small bosses. What it needs is to set the interest of the country and the people above all else. Our foreign policy supports the economy and policy, it supports the whole of our policy, because, despite its economic weakness, the country possesses an exceptionally good geopolitical position and a great historical and cultural heritage from which it currently derives much more power than it does from the economy, because the country has developed relations of trust and good neighbourliness, because the country bases its foreign policy on three principles, on three means: negotiation, consultation, mediation. Everything doesn’t have to happen publicly when we help sides with different outlooks or even different interests on the international stage to meet and to talk with our help.
This, first, gives us a long-term specialization in the international system, and, second, it makes us useful throughout that system. It makes us a solution, rather than part of the problem. We are not anyone’s accessory or “long arm.” We exercise foreign policy based on three criteria: First, the national interest and solidarity with embattled peoples; second, the European framework and its prospects; and third, international and European law.
In the past months, our foreign policy developed a specificity and a capability. To identify the problems. When we spoke of the triangle of instability at the end of January 2015 – a triangle that extends from Ukraine, at the top, to Libya on the bottom left and to Syria on the right; a triangle within which the Greek state is located – everyone thought it was an odd figure. Today, any politician dealing with international politics abroad uses this shape, this figure.
And the second is that when, in early February, we spoke for the first time in our foreign policy and we told the European organs that a new, very strong wave of migration was coming, because the UN had run out of money, and the average amount given to families in the camps in Jordan and Libya is 43 cents per day, and when we noted that, with the number of countries bombing Syria having reached eight, we are looking at an intense migration movement and waves, they told us that these waves wouldn’t come, that we were attempting disorientation, and some said I was talking nonsense. Today we see how far behind the European Union fell because it didn’t listen closely to our analyses.
Greece is a European country. But it is a European country that has an outlook on Europe, that pursues the promotion of its own outlook. Because we want another Europe, with more democracy, security and freedoms for the citizen, with more social policy and more social guarantees, with an upgraded role for the European Parliament, rather than the European Parliament’s being circumvented via mechanisms created during the crisis. Because, while we achieved the upgrading of the European Parliament through a 50-year struggle, the mechanisms for resolving the crisis, created by the European Union, sidelined the European Parliament.
At the same time, we are fighting for the revitalization of the ideas of the European Parliament, the European Union, the European whole, enriched by decades of experience. Because we need to see again the visions – as we say in the European Councils – and the identity of the European Union in the 21st century and directly. The European Union and the European continent need a strategy for social democratic development. What Europe doesn’t need is for young people to see what Europe offers being limited to penalties, sanctions – 27 states are under sanctions – and memorandums. When Europe is limited to these three tools, it naturally will not be attractive to the younger generations.
The Cyprus issue has top priority in our policy. I want to stress officially, from this podium, that the Greek government supports the negotiations based on the UN Security Council resolutions and the fact that Cyprus is a member state of the European Union.
We welcome every step of rapprochement between the two communities and we welcome the fact that we convinced the international negotiators to also bear in mind the rights of the three minorities that are in Cyprus and whose rights were forgotten for decades.
We believe that the Turkish Cypriots must get the rights that will ensure that they feel that this island, Cyprus, is their home, the space where the new generation of Turkish Cypriots will have the right to dream and feel that they can stay, live, make their families in the future.
And at the same time we believe that the Greek Cypriots must gain the ultimate right and sense of security from the occupation forces of “Northern Cyprus”. These forces must leave. There can be no solution to the Cyprus problem as long as occupation forces are maintained. This would not be a solution. It would be a repetition of what led us to 1974.
We also have to see an end to the guarantees. In April, the Greek government boldly reestablished the Cyprus problem on its fundamental basis. We stressed and underscored that the Cyprus problem is not an issue, as it was starting to appear, of allotment of natural resources from the gas that had been found, but that it is, above all, an issue of occupation, and that the guarantor powers – and above all I mean Turkey here – perpetrated multiple violations of the London and Zurich agreements and are not entitled to guarantor responsibilities. They are not thus entitled because the new rules, the new international law, allows neither the use of violence against a third country, nor its occupation.
We have set Turkey’s stance on the Cyprus issue as an important criterion for the development of Greek-Turkish relations. We believe and are carrying out the strengthening of our cooperation and the dialogue with Turkey – multifaceted and multi-level cooperation. We are promoting the MOUs. But at the same time we are not closing our eyes to the ongoing and provocative actions in the Aegean. We are taking the necessary measures and taking the necessary actions in the international environment and community. Of course, we welcome – and it is a positive thing – the fact of the reopening, even with a limited number of students, of the junior high schools and high schools on Imbros.
We are also promoting an MOU with FYROM. And we will move ahead with this discussion. It is none other than the government of FYROM that initially refused but in the end agreed to this negotiation. But the main thing is – and I said this in Skopje, for two hours in a public debate – that FYROM needs to abandon its irredentism, that it needs to agree in a realistic and constructive manner to the resolution of the name issue.
With Albania, we are continuing negotiations on a number of issues. We supported Mariupol as a major center of Hellenism, and we have taken measures to protect the Greek community there and provide healthcare and food. In the wider region, we support the stability of Egypt, of Jordan, of Lebanon, and we support the trilateral cooperation platforms.
We are not simply observers of international developments, but a proactive player. And to do this we need – allow me to explain this – a restoration of the Foreign Ministry. We are restoring the Center for Analysis and Planning and the Scientific Council, which the previous governments dissolved. We are creating a new Directorate for China, Mongolia, the Korean Peninsula.
SPEAKER: Mr. Minister, I will give you exactly one minute.
N. KOTZIAS: Then I will say one last thing. In this government, in this country, we must all agree that there need to be rules and that these rules may annoy some, but they are rules for the functioning of a democratic state.
The first rule is that the diplomats who in 2006 revealed the NGO scandal are returning. In fact, they took on the job of clearing up the scandal, because they revealed it.
Another rule is that personnel who have been convicted and sentenced to 20 years for felonies cannot be relieved of duty and put on leave. We have wonderful personnel at the Foreign Ministry. We have wonderful diplomats, experts, legal and economic experts, commercial counsellors. But there are also those who broke the rules.
It is a rule that we asked for the return of the 10 million euros taken by NGOs without documents or receipts.
It is a rule that we stopped and have taken all the necessary actions for the Foreign Ministry to stop paying the power bills and shared expenses of the multi-storey parking garage on Zalokosta St., which has to date cost us €1.5 million. I don’t know how it happened that the Foreign Ministry was paying for the business premises of third parties.
SPEAKER: Mr. Minister, you are out of time. Please wind up.
N. KOTZIAS: It is a rule – and we have finished with this – that the Ministry does not – as it did from 2007 on – issue diplomatic and official passports for businesspeople who are friends. No more diplomatic passports for friends! Such passports are for people who are in the service of the Greek public sector and public goods.
And it is also a rule that when a Minister exercises a veto on an important national issue, no diplomat has the right to withdraw it because he doesn’t like it or he is under pressure from third parties.
And – one last thing – it is a rule that we uncover and work to uncover visa-selling networks. I will not allow the networks that sold visas to be covered up. To be clear.
And there are some who should understand the last rule, because they vilify the Foreign Ministry, they vilify the best diplomats we have on the highest level.
And there should be a last rule. There are those who have to understand that the Foreign Ministry is neither a personal nor a family affair. The Foreign Ministry and foreign policy belong to the Greek people, to Greek society, and the Foreign Ministry and foreign policy serve them, not clientelism.
October 8, 2015