East Med maritime borders deepen a regional schism following Libyan backing of Turkish boundary agreement

The eastern Mediterranean’s maritime borders are causing a schism in the region as Turkey, Libya, Greece, Cyprus, and Egypt joust over competing interests. Turkey has an eastern Libyan sponsor for its 2019 maritime memorandum and the backing of both Libyan administrations, while Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, and the EU are answering with claims and legal steps of their own.

Background: The memorandum, which Istanbul signed in November 2019 with Libya’s Government of National Accord (GNA), draws a maritime boundary between the Turkish and Libyan coasts across a stretch of the eastern Mediterranean where gas discoveries have produced overlapping claims. The GNA was dissolved around two years later. Libya’s eastern House of Representatives, which rejected the agreement in 2020 while Ankara was arming the Tripoli government against Khalifa Haftar’s forces, voted unanimously on Tuesday to adopt it and scrapped the two 2020 resolutions that had rejected the Turkish accords and cut political ties with Ankara, the Associated Press reports.

Cairo and Athens are consulting on widening the geographic scope of the maritime boundary agreement they signed in 2020, with Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty and his Greek counterpart George Gerapetritis agreeing to pursue the extension under that agreement’s provisions. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry ministry called the Turkish memorandum “null and void” with no consequences for its maritime rights, while leaving room to negotiate with Ankara.

The infrastructure stake is as live as the gas. Athens and Nicosia view the memorandum as an attempt to block the Great Sea Interconnector, the USD 2.1 bn subsea power cable linking Greece to Cyprus and later Israel, already delayed by the dispute over waters off Crete, Sotirios Zartaloudis of the University of Birmingham tells Al Jazeera. For Cairo, the larger concern is likely the possibility of a Turkish military presence in eastern Libya, security and policy analyst Wolfgang Pusztai says.

How far the memorandum travels depends on Libyan institutions rather than on the vote. Anas El Gomati of the Sadeq Institute expects implementation to run through bodies such as the National Oil Corporation under pressure that is “diplomatic and slow,” and links the reversal to Ankara’s standing with the Haftar camp and to Saddam Haftar’s own route to power, Reuters reports. The vote followed this month’s replacement of long-serving speaker Aguila Saleh, long seen as Egypt’s ally in the chamber.