DEPUTY SECRETARY STEINBERG'S MEETING WITH GREEK FOREIGN

C O N F I D E N T I A L ATHENS 001257

NOFORN
SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: DECL: 2019/07/17
TAGS: PREL PGOV OVIP GR
SUBJECT: DEPUTY SECRETARY STEINBERG'S MEETING WITH GREEK FOREIGN
MINISTER BAKOYANNIS

CLASSIFIED BY: Daniel V. Speckhard, Ambassador, State, EXEC; REASON:
1.4(B),(D)

Summary

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1. (C) Greek Foreign Minister and OSCE Chair-in-Office Theodora
Bakoyannis told Deputy Secretary Steinberg May 15 that although
she had stopped negotiations on an OSCE mandate in Georgia, her
last proposal remained on the table in case Russia were to
reconsider its position. She agreed that Russian plans for the
informal OSCE Corfu ministerial in June remained unclear, but she
hoped to be able to help get a dialogue started. She confirmed
that OSCE would send an "election preparation" team to Afghanistan.
She urged the U.S. to press Macedonian Prime Minster Gruevski to
take a more constructive stance on the name issue, which she said
could be solved quickly if there was political will in Skopje. She
said Cyprus should be unified as part of the EU, not as a
confederation with two entirely separate parts; Steinberg noted
that Turkish Cypriots would have to be somehow reassured that they
would not be swallowed up demographically after a settlement.
Bakoyannis expressed concern about Turkish overflights and
territorial claims in the Aegean, saying she did not understand the
purpose behind them. She and Steinberg discussed peace prospects
in the Middle East, and she urged the U.S. to help the EU's FRONTEX
border agency deal with the huge influx of illegal immigrants into
Greece. Steinberg expressed hope that we were on track for Greece
to enter the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) soon and Bakoyannis said
Parliament would be ready to ratify the necessary agreements
quickly once they were received. End Summary.



Deadlock on Georgia

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2. (C) Deputy Secretary Steinberg and the Ambassador followed up
their meeting with Prime Minister Karamanlis (septel) with an
almost two-hour discussion with Bakoyannis on both OSCE and Greek
issues. Bakoyannis noted that the day before she had instructed
the Greek Ambassador to OSCE to end efforts to find a new proposal
that would win Russian support for re-opening the OSCE Mission in
Georgia. She said the last Greek proposal remained on the table
should the Russians reconsider their approach, but at present there
seemed to be no point in continuing efforts to find a compromise.
She said the underlying problem was that "practically no one"
wanted the OSCE there - not the Russians or the Georgians, the
latter because of OSCE's other roles including democratic
development. She agreed with Steinberg that despite this OSCE was
needed in the conflict zone, and that efforts in Geneva and New
York to establish UN monitoring in Georgia seemed to be similarly
deadlocked. She said she had thought of re-opening OSCE on the
Georgian-controlled side only, but it was not clear that allies
would support this. Having exhausted the direct approach in
negotiations, Bakoyannis said the only possibility now was to focus
on improving dialogue with an eye toward possibly resuming
negotiations when attitudes change.



Russia's Approach to Corfu?

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3. (C) Bakoyannis said it was her impression that the meeting
between Secretary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov had
gone well, and Steinberg agreed. She said she hoped the Corfu
meeting would prepare the basis for a sustained dialogue with
Russia in the OSCE, in parallel with the NATO-Russia and EU-Russia
dialogues. She said she sometimes got the impression there were
two voices in Russia, the MFA's and the Army's. Steinberg said the
general view in the USG was that the Russian military has less room
now to pursue its own policies, and that both Putin and Medvedev
currently needed each other's support to carry out policies.




4. (C) Steinberg asked what Bakoyannis expected at Corfu, and she
said Lavrov would outline Russian ideas in Vienna a few days
before, and that the agenda at Corfu would combine "harder edge"
issues with softer ones. She hoped the meeting would be able to
bring together four or five points of agreement that would launch a
more structured dialogue. She acknowledged that the first working
dinner in Corfu, where ministers would be alone to give their first
reactions to a Greek paper, could be a tough discussion. She said
it was clear at the December OSCE ministerial that Russia was


waiting for the new U.S. administration before showing its cards,
and the Corfu ministerial offered an opportunity for Russia to
explain its goals more clearly. Even though this dialogue might be
contentious at first, Bakoyannis said it could be useful and that
most EU members wanted to find a "new balance" with Russia.




5. (C) Steinberg said it was surprising that the Russians had not
already been clearer about their purposes in the OSCE framework,
and he wondered whether they had a deeper strategy or were
defensively fighting on issues across the board. He said the U.S.
wanted to re-frame the relationship, and the "re-set button" had
been intended to get beyond the difficult issues of the past about
which the Russians remained sensitive. Bakoyannis said this was a
good approach, and she agreed with Steinberg that the President's
upcoming visit to Russia could go a long way toward improving the
atmosphere in the relationship. Noting that she had been in Moscow
on U.S. Inauguration Day, she said the streets were deserted and
Russians were glued to their televisions, just like the Greeks.



An Election Team to Afghanistan

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6. (C) Bakoyannis said OSCE would send a team to Afghanistan to
work on "election preparation," although this would not technically
be an election monitoring effort because the EU had wanted to be
the sole observing organization. She said she had asked NATO SYG
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer about protection for the team, and Steinberg
said it was a legitimate concern that was also a challenge for our
"civilian surge." Bakoyannis said the team would not go to the
"last two provinces" in the south, and Steinberg said the increase
in U.S. military forces in the south was intended to provide
additional security in Pashtun areas that were important for the
election's legitimacy.



Tackling the Name Issue

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7. (C) Noting that Steinberg would next travel to Skopje,
Bakoyannis said that despite extensive discussions the Greeks had
been unable to get through to Macedonian Prime Minister Gruevski
that solving the name issue was a win-win. She said EU, NATO, and
other officials had been similarly unsuccessful. She said Gruevski
held all the political cards in "FYROM" after winning elections,
but unfortunately he had won as an extreme nationalist on the name
and other issues. She said that only the U.S. had enough political
leverage over Gruevski to get him to approach the negotiations
seriously. Steinberg said that if the Macedonians made the
political decision to seek a solution seriously, he was confident
that an acceptable name could be worked out. Bakoyannis agreed.



Cyprus: Turkey's Door to the EU

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8. (C) Bakoyannis said any resolution of the Cyprus conflict would
have to be based on a united country in the EU. She said a
peaceful resolution would be a huge success for Turkey, showing
Europeans that Turks could be part of the EU. Unfortunately, she
said, top Turkish officials did not fully appreciate the importance
of this factor, which in reality made Cyprus resolution much more
important to Turkey than to Greece. She explained that a
confederation - in reality two states - would not be workable, even
if it was inaccurately called a federation. Steinberg said he
believed there was an underlying interest in Cyprus in breaking
down barriers, and that the international community should
facilitate the development of natural flows between the two sides
of the island. He added that Turkish Cypriots would have to have
some institutional assurances that, as a minority, they would not
disappear after resolution. Bakoyannis said the EU provided that
assurance, and Steinberg replied that, because of their experience,
the Turkish Cypriots did not yet have confidence in that.



Dangerous Games in the Aegean


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9. (C) Asked by the Ambassador, Bakoyannis said she had not yet
spoken to the new Turkish Foreign Minister, but she hoped Prime
Minister Erdogan would come to Greece for the opening of the New
Acropolis Museum on June 20, which would permit talks that might
improve the bilateral atmosphere. Steinberg described the new
Foreign Minister Davutoglu as a sophisticated thinker, but
Bakoyannis said some of his past comments about Greek issues caused
grave concern, although she had tried to play this down publicly by
emphasizing more positive quotes. She said the Turkish overflights
were a major problem, as was the theory of "gray zones" adopted by
Turkey in 1996 to question the sovereignty of Greece over Aegean
islands. She said that while limits on airspace, territorial sea
and the continental shelf were all open to negotiation, Greek
sovereignty of the islands were non-negotiable. Given this
reality, she said she could not understand the overflights.




10. (C) Steinberg stressed the importance of confidence building
and said we had made it clear to Turkey that we were worried about
these incidents. Bakoyannis added that they put the Greek
government in a difficult position, considering the effect on
public opinion in Greece and the Greek government's continued
support for Turkey's EU membership. She predicted Turkey probably
would do something to permit the Halki Seminary to re-open, which
was good, but Halki was perceived in Greece as a religious freedom
issue not a bilateral issue. Bakoyannis said she had the
impression that there was a feeling in Turkey of being surrounded
by Greek islands, but this feeling made little sense inside the EU;
no one could believe, she said, that Greece would attack Turkey.



Hope for the Middle East Peace Process?

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11. (C) Bakoyannis said Greece was well-positioned to serve as a
bridge to the Arab world and could do more in the region. She
asked about U.S. views of the new Israeli government, and Steinberg
said the President's upcoming meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu
would help clarify the picture on the Middle East peace process.
Bakoyannis said some European Foreign Ministers had recently come
back from Israel discouraged, but Steinberg urged her and her EU
colleagues to withhold judgment. Bakoyannis said that if the peace
process got on track again, Greece would be willing to play a role
using its good relations with both Arab countries and Israel.



The Illegal Migration Challenge

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12. (C) Noting a recent agreement between the U.S. and the EU
border agency FRONTEX, Bakoyannis said Greece would welcome U.S.
participation as an observer in FRONTEX's Operation Poseidon to
interdict illegal migration in the Aegean. The Ambassador noted
our close engagement with the Greek Coast Guard on this issue, and
said we were open to further cooperation in dealing with this
problem. Bakoyannis said the flood of people was overwhelming
small Greek islands and causing a humanitarian crisis as smugglers
leave the migrants in dire conditions. The Ambassador noted that
dealing with the problem would require an EU-wide effort, with all
the countries on the migration route to work together. Bakoyannis
said Turkey was not implementing a bilateral alien readmission
protocol signed in 2001, but Greece understood that Turkey - like
Greece - faced serious challenges as a transit country. She said
Greece had been active in getting the EU to fund camps in Turkey,
and would continue to look for solutions that addressed all aspects
of the problem and had political will behind them.



Visa Waiver on Track

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13. (C) Steinberg said he thought we were on a "good track" for
completing the VWP process and he asked Bakoyannis how Greece would
move forward on the remaining agreements that were tied to VWP.
She said that, after the agreements were finalized, Parliament


would ratify them as soon as it opened. She noted that the
Parliamentary majority had never lost a major vote and said it
would not lose on these agreements. Bakoyannis stressed that,
unlike many other foreign policy issues, the VWP was something
ordinary Greeks understood and would benefit from. The Ambassador
added that, although this was not formally part of the VWP, we were
watching closely to see that Greece completed ratification of the
U.S.-EU Mutual Legal Assistance and Extradition Agreements. He
explained how the final steps of the VWP process would work on the
U.S. side, and Steinberg stressed that we would maintain the pace
to complete the process in a timely way.



Other Issues

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14. (C) When Bakoyannis mentioned the need to activate bilateral
working groups, the Ambassador stressed that while we already had a
number of groups in place for the defense and economic issues, we
were lacking a similar process for political issues. The
Ambassador also expressed our support for Greece in the fight
against terrorism - both domestic and foreign - and Bakoyannis said
Greece's support for the U.S. was strong as well. She noted that
the Greek government had taken controversial measures in Parliament
to fight terrorism, and the Greek police was working with
international partners including the U.S. and UK to re-organize in
order to deal with the domestic threat. Steinberg noted Greek
actions to stop shipments that raised proliferation concerns, and
the Ambassador expressed our interest in re-activating talks on a
PSI Shipboarding Agreements, which had stalled in part because of
reservations on the part of ship owners. Bakoyannis said the
government would be willing to talk again with the shippers. She
asked whether the U.S. would increase counter-piracy forces off the
Horn of Africa, and Steinberg said there was much work underway to
improve the effectiveness of these operations.




15. (U/C) Deputy Secretary Steinberg has cleared this cable.
SPECKHARD