Army tanks headed for the scrap heap

 

THE army is planning to scrap a number of French-made tanks it has decided are obsolete, and replace them with modern ones, the defence ministry announced yesterday.

The ministry was responding to a report in daily Phileleftheros, which suggested that 54 AMX30G tanks – which came from Greece’s surpluses — were facing the chop because of the government’s cost-cutting policies.

The tanks were in operation in Greece in the 1970s.

The paper also carried photographs showing one such tank that was cut to pieces.

Phileleftheros, citing unnamed army officers, added that the majority of the tanks were still operational.

Without confirming the figure quoted in Phileleftheros, the ministry said the specific first-generation tanks arrived in Cyprus in 1996 and at the time they were expected to be utilised for a few years after an upgrade.

The same type of tanks was replaced by the French army in 1990s, the ministry said.

“In 2007, the army command informed the defence ministry that there was no potential for further use and that the equipment, due to its age, had become dangerous for the personnel,” a defence ministry statement said.

When Costas Papacostas became defence minister in 2008, it was decided to replace and modernise tanks from this squadron “with the purchase of new tanks, which will soon be incorporated in the National Guard arsenal,” the ministry said.

It has already emerged that the government was buying 41 used Russian-made T-80 tanks for around €100 million.

Concerning the AMX30G tanks, the ministry said it had been suggested to ‘cannibalise” equipment from one tank and fit it to another where necessary in order to maintain a large number in operation.

“But irrespective of the number of efforts, these tanks have an expiration date,” the ministry said. “For this reason instructions were given to assess the cost and time of destroying these tanks when deemed necessary.”

The ministry reassured that the condition of the National Guard’s armoured force is “very good and it was continuously upgraded” to fulfil its role as a preventive force.

 

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.