Greece and Turkey should reinforce trust and strengthen cooperation on common problems as they make attempts to resolve their discrepencies, Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday before a trip to Athens. “There is no issue we cannot have solutions for through dialogue on the basis of mutual goodwill,” Erdogan told Kathimerini newspaper in an interview, a day before the two nations’ fifth High-level Cooperation Council (HCC) in Athens.
The neighbours and NATO allies have been at odds for decades over problems which includes where their continental shelves begin and end, energy resources, overflights of the Aegean Sea, and ethnically split Cyprus. They reached the brink of war in the 1990s. Erdogan and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis agreed in July to resume conversations and confidence-building measures as they hailed a new, “optimistic climate” in ties after more than a year of tensions over energy resources and defence issues. Erdogan, who is due to meet Mitsotakis on Thursday, said that Turkey was honestly attempting to resolve its discrepancies with Greece and that Greece had realised that Turkey would never deny an extended hand of friendship.