Balkan Pact (1953)

Balkan Pact

Agreement of Friendship and Cooperation
Balkan Pact   Other NATO states
Signed	28 February 1953 (1953-02-28)
Location	Ankara, Turkey
Expiration	Indefinite; never officially terminated[1]
Signatories	Greece  Turkey  Yugoslavia
Languages	Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish

The Balkan Pact (Greek: Βαλκανικό Σύμφωνο, Macedonian: Балкански пакт, Serbo-Croatian: Balkanski pakt / Балкански пакт, Slovene: Balkanski pakt, Turkish: Balkan Paktı) of 1953, officially known as the Agreement of Friendship and Cooperation, was a treaty signed by Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia on 28 February 1953. It was signed in Ankara. The treaty was to act as a deterrence against Soviet expansion in the Balkans and provided for the eventual creation of a joint military staff for the three countries. When the pact was created and signed, Turkey and Greece had been members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for a year, having both joined on 18 February 1952, while Yugoslavia was a socialist non-aligned state that later became a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement. The Balkan Pact allowed Yugoslavia to de facto associate itself with NATO on geopolitical affairs while remaining officially neutral. In October 1954, Israeli government expressed their interest in joining the alliance in expectation that Yugoslavia would act as a mediator in development of the Egypt–Israel relations; Yugoslav authorities were open to the proposal.^[2] However, Israel never ended up joining the alliance.^[2]