TURKEY may have engineered the collapse of the north’s ‘government’ so that it could replace it with one more accepting of a rumoured new initiative on Cyprus, it was alleged yesterday.
“Turkey is desperate to initiate a new action on Cyprus, and it needs the support of the TRNC government,” Kudret Akay, chief advisor to Serdar Denktash, whose Democrat Party (DP) was forced out of office on Monday, told the Cyprus Mail yesterday.
It is now expected that a new coalition administration will be formed between the left-leaning Republican Turkish Party (CTP), which resigned on Monday, and a group of four deputies who resigned from Denktash’s DP and the main opposition party the National Unity Party (UBP).
Akay said it was possible that Turkey had decided, in the run-up to the publication of the EU’s progress report on its ongoing accession process in October, that it needed to remove elements in the Turkish Cypriot administration that might stand in the way of a new initiative on Cyprus.
“There are suspicions that Turkey will come under so much pressure to open its ports [to Greek Cypriot shipping and air traffic]… that it needs a government in north Cyprus that will not object,” Akay said, adding that the Turkish government was probably aware that the DP would never have accepted such a move. The CTP, on the other hand, would “not show such sensitivity” if Turkey was to open its ports.
Akay is not the only person in the north to believe “something is cooking” in Turkish and Turkish Cypriot political circles. On Monday, ex-UBP leader Huseyin Ozgurgun, who resigned in the wake of the resignation of three of his deputies, said the collapse of the administration had come about as a result of a “plot engineered by [Turkey’s ruling party] the AK Party, the CTP and the Mufti [of the Turkish Cypriot community]”. He even went as far as accusing his ex-deputies of accepting bribes in order to leave his party.
“We know money was mentioned because similar offers were made to other of our MPs,” Ozgurgun said.
He also accused the Turkish Embassy in north Nicosia of “being complicit” in the plot, and said the embassy had sought to have him sacked as UBP leader because of his opposition to the establishment of the north’s property commission – something the Turkish government was keen to see set up in order to placate the EU over around 1,400 Greek Cypriot property cases against it at the European Court of Human Rights (ECRH).
“Before the local elections, the ambassador called all the municipality heads and, because of our opposition to the property commission, told them to ‘get rid of that caretaker leader, otherwise you won’t get any more support from me’,” he said, adding that some municipalities actually had funds withheld by the embassy when they refused to carry out the ambassador’s wishes.
The ex-leader now says he thinks one of the only alternatives left open to his party is to boycott ‘parliament’. Such a move could paralyse political processes in the north, and could, if Akay’s assertion is correct, lead to a major run-in with the Turkish government.
The collapse of the Turkish Cypriot ‘government’ has not gone unnoticed by opposition parties in Ankara. Democratic Left Party (DSP) general secretary Zeki Sezer said on Monday: “There is a bad smell coming from Cyprus, and its source is in Ankara”. He added: “There is a widely-held view that there has been some distasteful bargaining going on and that the AK Party, at its highest level, is part of it.”
The Turkish Ambassador in north Nicosia Aydan Karahan yesterday emphatically denied his or the Turkish government’s involvement in the “internal dynamics” of Turkish Cypriot politics and accused those who said there had been interference of making “cheap and irresponsible remarks”.
“Developments in Turkish Cypriot politics are without doubt the result of internal factors,” he said.
