Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım turned his sights on his leftist Greek counterpart, Alexis Tsipras, over the weekend, attacking the latter over the issue of eight Turkish army aviation servicemen who fled to Greece aboard a militry helicopter and requested political asylum after an unsuccessful July 2016 coup in the neighboring country.
At the same time, Yildrim ruled out the prospect of his AKP-dominated government intervening with the Turkish judiciary over the continued detention of two Greek servicemen, who have been held in Turkey since March 1, 2018 after allegedly straying over the Greek-Turkish land border.
“Why doesn’t Tsipras deal with this issue (the eight Turk officers and NCOs)? They executed a coup in Turkey. They killed people and hurt the country. Now the Greek soldiers are on trial,” he said.
In reality, no fixed court date has been set for the two Greek servicemen and a “snail’s pace” investigation is continuing by a Turkish first instance prosecutor in the city of Edirne. An initial charge of entering a restricted military zone has kept the pair detained in a maximum security prison, whereas previous such incidents were resolved in a matter of hours.
“The (Turkish) justice system will do what it is obliged to do. We (government) cannot intervene in the judicial process,” Yildrim said, while criticizing Tsipras for not doing the opposite.
In a parting shot, the conservative Turkish prime minister opined that Greece has become a “safe haven for putschists”, a now ubiquitous catchphrase by the increasingly authoritarian Erdogan-dominated country for opponents who fled Turkey, especially people it claims are “Gulenists”.
