Turkey and Greece end Aegean feud

Greece and Turkey have tentatively settled a decades-old dispute over how to share the airspace over the Aegean Sea for military flights.

The deal, announced yesterday at a meeting of chiefs-of-staff of Nato nations, must now be endorsed by the political leaders of both Greece and Turkey. It was hailed as a breakthrough by General Klaus Naumann, head of Nato's panel of military chiefs.

The most immediate result was Nato's announcement that it can now set up regional commands in the south-eastern Mediterranean in which Greek and Turkish officers will work side by side, something that has eluded the alliance for decades.

"Both nations showed great flexibility," General Naumann said. His announcement left Britain alone in rejecting Nato's overall new military command structure that would cut the main and regional headquarters from 65 to 24. Britain disagrees with Spain over the status of the Gibraltar airport.

Under the tentative Greek-Turkish accord, the two nations will share control over military flights in the Aegean. They will also consider null and void 1957 documents in which Nato held to a policy of massive retaliation against enemy attacks from the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. That policy was abandoned long before the Cold War ended, but the texts have never formally been set aside. Consequently they have loomed large over relations between Greece and Turkey.

- AP, Brussels