‘My critics are living in cloud cuckoo land’
President makes statement to the Sunday Times after reopening of borders
CRITICS of President Ersin Tatar’s close ties with Turkey are living in “cloud cuckoo land” he told the Sunday Times.
Mr Tatar talked to the British newspaper as part of an article published following the reopening of crossing points on the island, which had been closed for more than a year to the general public due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We insist that we should be recognised as equals: equal sovereignty and international status,” he told reporter Louise Callaghan in Lefkoşa.
“We want peace, we want stability, we want co-operation. If we have co-operation on the island then it will be good for all Cypriots because Turkey is a main market here.”
There is “no motivation” for the Greek Cypriot side to have a “serious negotiating process”, Mr Tatar was quoted as saying, “because they have the upper hand”.
Callaghan described President Tatar as a “right-wing nationalist” leader who “wants to abandon any hope of reunification and form two separate states”.
She wrote that critics of President Tatar have accused him of “dragging the Turkish-speaking population [of Cyprus] back towards a more divided, violent past”; that he is “too reliant” on “enthusiastic backers” in Ankara; and that there has been “gossip among Turkish Cypriots of a Crimea-style referendum on Turkish rule followed by annexation – a claim Tatar adamantly denies”.
“My critics don’t understand
the Cyprus problem, my critics live in a [cloud] cuckoo land,” President Tatar scoffed.
“What I’m saying is basically this is a national issue. Turkish interests and Turkish Cypriots’ interests are overlapping.”
The article, which described Mr Tatar as a “Cambridgeeducated British citizen” who “still has a flat in London” said that he has campaigned “so far fruitlessly” for a “postBrexit Britain to recognise” the TRNC and to begin direct flights from the UK.
“We asked the British because now that you are out of Europe, after Brexit, you are more independent, you can, you know, take a few decisions that would be in our favour and nobody can object to it. So we are working on it,” he was reported to have said.
Young Turkish Cypriots want “employment, economic opportunities and a lifting of the embargo that makes trade so difficult and the Turkish Cypriot passport almost useless”, the article said, while “many Turkish Cypriots” see themselves as “more liberal than inhabitants” from Turkey who are being “settled on the island to swing its demographics – and voting habits – in favour of Ankara”, a claim rejected by Mr Tatar.
“For him, and many Turkish Cypriots, Turkey is the motherland, the only nation that invests in their economy, helping them to compete with the benefits they see the south deriving from the EU,” Callaghan wrote.
“They also see Ankara as a saviour which stopped Turkish Cypriots from being massacred by sending troops in 1974 after a coup staged by supporters of unification with Greece. . . Today, he sees his two-state approach as a way to guarantee peace, rather than deepen divisions.”
Mr Tatar, who spent his childhood “in fear of intercommunal violence”, said: “Now, it’s so easy, [with] peace, stability. It’s very difficult to imagine what happened – it was terrifying. . . I never want to live through it again.”
Former British High Commissioner to Cyprus Peter Millet told the Sunday Times that he does not believe a twostate solution in Cyprus “will ever be accepted”.
“I don’t know whether it’s just a negotiating position that’s going to take a lot of driving them away from,” he told the paper, which also noted that former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has come out in support of a two-state settlement.