THOUSANDS of Turkish Cypriot ‘state’ employees are expected to take to the streets of northern Nicosia today in a rally against an economic austerity package they say has been imposed by Ankara.
Dubbed ‘Ankara’s destruction package’, unions are furious over the raft of measures, implemented January 1, designed to reduce Ankara’s half billion dollar annual bailout of the Turkish Cypriot budget deficit.
“Some salaries have been cut by 40 per cent,” Turkish Cypriot Secondary Teachers Union (KTOS) head Sener Elcil told the Cyprus Mail yesterday.
Elcil also hit out at part of the package that plans to privatize ‘state-run’ corporations in the north, describing them as “a transfer of power from Turkish Cypriots to mainland Turks”.
“This is not about privatisation but about transferring bodies which are now in Turkish Cypriot hands to the hands of businessmen in Turkey,” he said.
Last year Cyprus Turkish Airlines (CTA), the north’s predominantly ‘state-owned’ carrier was disbanded with a loss of 700 jobs. Later this year the airline is set to re-emerge under a new name, under private ownership. Similar plans are underway for the electricity provider, telecommunications, the Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU) and number of other ‘state-run’ enterprises.
Led by twenty-eight trades unions and NGOs, Turkish Cypriot ‘state’ employees will close offices, schools, ports and airports tomorrow and stage a mass rally under the banner “Communal Survival” in northern Nicosia’s Inonu Square. Hospitals will be providing emergency cover only.
Organisers say they have planned the rally to coincide with a Turkish Cypriot uprising against British colonial rule in 1958 and expect a turnout of up to 20,000 people.
The Turkish Cypriot authorities yesterday accused the unions of hijacking the anniversary, with ‘prime minister’ Ersin Kucuk complaining that “rather than remembering our martyrs, a group of unionists are trying to push our people into rebellion against the government and against Turkey at a time when economic cutbacks are unavoidable”.
He added that today’s strike and rally had “nothing to do with austerity”, but was the expression of some trades unionists’ political agendas.
Faced with economic austerity and rising living costs, disgruntled Turkish Cypriot opinion is often focused on the Turkish government in Ankara, which many see as exercising its own political and economic will against the interests of the island’s indigenous population.
“Who is going to stay and work for these salaries? Most will go to Europe, and we’ll be replaced by people from Turkey,” 28 year-old schoolteacher Hatice Dortlemez told the Mail.
