Costas Simitis

Can I just make one little point about the intervening period? Because there are two things that stand out to me that need to be brought up.

And the first is that, uh, to recover some of the lost ground in terms of alliances and friendships and partnerships, um, uh, the Greek leadership, especially under Costas Simitis, had to tread a very thin line between, uh, uh, being a sort of more independent actor in the Balkans and also being a supporter of NATO actions, especially in relation to Kosovo.

And that was a step which Simitis took, which was very dangerous domestically in terms of political alignments by saying that, "Look, we will not participate in any NATO intervention against Serbia and Kosovo, but we won't stop our allies using Greek territory to support that particular operation." And that went a long way in starting to rebuild the fences and the image of what Greece was in relation to its Western partners.

And of course, in the, in the nineteen nineties, there was also another confrontation with Turkey which nearly came to war, the Imia crisis, which cannot be ignored.