Posted on 10/03/2022 5:07:43 AM PDT by FarCenter
A mild flutter ensued after Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar’s recent meeting with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) session in New York on September 21 when it came to be known that Cyprus figured in their discussion. Jaishankar highlighted it in a tweet.
The Indian media instinctively related this to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan making a one-line reference to the Kashmir issue earlier that day in his address to the UNGA.
But Jaishankar, being a scholar-diplomat, would know that the Cyprus issue is in the news cycle and the new cold war conditions breathe fresh life into it, as tensions mount in the Turkish-Greek rivalry, which often draws comparison with the India-Pakistan animosity, stemming from another historical “Partition” – under the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) that ended the Ottoman Empire.
The beauty of peace treaties is that they have no “expiration date,” but the Treaty of Lausanne was signed for a period of a hundred years between Turkey on one side and Britain, France, Italy, Greece and their allies on the other. The approaching date heightens the existential predicament at the heart of Turkey’s foreign policy.
The stunning reality is that by July 24, 2023, Turkey’s modern borders will become “obsolete.”
Secret articles of the 1923 treaty signed by Turkish and British diplomats provide for a chain of strange happenings – British troops will reoccupy the forts overlooking the Bosphorus; the Greek Orthodox Patriarch will resurrect a Byzantine mini-state within Istanbul’s city walls; and Turkey will finally be able to tap the forbidden vast energy resources of the Eastern Mediterranean (and, perhaps, regain Western Thrace, a province of Greece).
Of course, none of that can happen and they remain conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, “end-of-Lausanne” syndrome remains a foundational myth and weaves neatly into the historical revisionism that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk should have gotten a much better deal from the Western powers.
Lulz, the US mad cause India and Turkey did not fall in line and remained neutral....
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