THE TURKISH economic crisis is having a crippling effect on businesses in the occupied areas of Cyprus.
With the Turkish Lira in freefall, one Turkish Cypriot professional yesterday told the Cyprus Mail that foreign exchange offices in the north had been forced temporarily to close, which means any tourists arriving there would struggle to buy local currency.
She said there had been chaos on the market since a row between Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer sparked the crisis on Monday.
“On Tuesday, we saw banks rushing to the Central Bank to buy vast quantities of foreign currency and then on Wednesday they were returning to sell it back,” she added. “The situation’s so turbulent that no-one really knows what’s going on. If you walked into a shop with foreign money the owner would have to make a series of calls just to establish what it’s worth, before you could even buy anything,” she added.
The woman confessed she has lost half the value of her savings this week, and that many other Turkish Cypriots were in a similar predicament.
“We always know it’s a risk to keep Turkish Lira in the bank, but no-one could have predicted this sort of fall in value – it’s unbelievable.” And she added that the atmosphere in the occupied areas was generally tense, as people worried about how the crisis would develop.
Turkish Cypriot papers reported yesterday that growing unemployment was eroding the Security Fund’s deposits in the banks. According to research carried out by one paper, the Fund is loosing one trillion TL a month in terms of reduced contributions. Mehmet Burhan, ‘under secretary to the Prime Ministry,’ announced this week that there would be no development tax deductions from public sector salaries this month, and no tax from pensions.
‘Prime Minister’ Dervis Eroglu has denied suggestions that the economy of the occupied areas is on the verge of collapse, but admitted there was a real possibility it would if a ‘government’ package of economic measures was not implemented. He vowed that politicians would make sacrifices to help bring the economy back onto its feet, which he said may mean a reduction in top rank privileges.
Varol Oztug, the leader of a teachers’ union in the north, has accused the current administration of being at fault for the economy’s difficulties, and said the only way the situation could be resolved was through a change of ‘government’. Oztug argued the economy would collapse if the government economic package was introduced and said 41 union organisations would oppose the move.
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.
