NEWLY-DISCLOSED plans to privatise the north’s Ercan (Tymbou) Airport have been met with anger from trades unions, who say the Turkish Cypriot authorities want to impose sweeping cuts in public sector employment as part of austerity measures handed down by Ankara.
Ankara has shown signs recently that it wants to see the north doing more to reduce its burden on the Turkish taxpayer. Currently it gives the Turkish Cypriot side around half a billion dollars annually to maintain its top-heavy public sector and bridge its gaping balance of payment deficit.
The latest privatisation move comes amid what many believe will become a wave of privatisations taking in most of the north’s ‘state-run’ corporations.
So far the authorities have managed only one major privatisation, that of the ‘state’ airline Cyprus Turkish Airlines (CTA), which was sold off to private operator Turkish Atlas Jet earlier this year.
CTA’s privatisation resulted in large-scale public protests and a one-day general strike in June. The unions however failed to prevent the sell-off from taking place.
Plans to privatise Ercan were disclosed in an interview with Turkish Cypriot ‘prime minister’ Ersin Kucuk published in a local Turkish-language newspaper on Sunday.
“Traffic has increased at Ercan and we need to bring it up to international standards,” Kucuk said, adding that “big investors” were already pouring money in major tourism developments in the north. This, he believed, created good prospects for development of the north’s main airport. A tender agreement could be signed by the end of the year, he said.
Adding to union fears of further privatisation plans Kucuk announced that the privatisation of the north’s telecom facility was also “on the agenda”. Seeking public support for his plan, Kucuk said selling off the facility would reduce the costs of calls to the consumer. Current prices are several times higher than equivalent services provided by the Cyprus’ semi-state operator CyTA.
Head of the Turkish Cypriot Teachers Union (TKOS) Sener Elcil, responding to Kucuk’s statements, said many of the services at Ercan had already been privatised, including parking and other ground services.
“These are handled by CAS, which is a private company,” Elcil said. He added that the wages of ‘state’ employees were already being “squeezed” by extra taxation while high-ranking managerial positions were being given out to Turkish mainlanders, who, he said, seemed not to be subject to the austerity measures imposed by the authorities.
Elcil accused the authorities in the north of being a “puppet government” operating, not in the interests of its electorate, but in the interests of Turkey, and warned that Kucuk’s privatisation plans would not benefit consumers in Cyprus because tenders would be open to companies in Turkey. He and other unions pledged to fight the measures.
Some businesspeople in the north have however backed the ‘government’s’ privatisation moves, saying they are the only way of improving the currently depressed economic climate.
Former head of the Turkish Cypriot Chamber of Commerce Gunay Cerkez reacted to news of the privatisation plans by saying, “It is undeniable that the performance of state-run enterprises need to be transformed to turn them into productive entities”. Cerkez added that privatisation was a global reality and that it would need to take place in order to turn the north economy into one that could eventually be absorbed into the EU.
Member of the Young Businesspersons Association Gizen Celiker Akandere echoed Cerkez’s view by saying, “If we are a country that supports the liberal economy and EU norms, then we must follow the example of those countries”.
She added however that laws in the north would have to be changed to allow for privatisation to happen in a “fair and transparent way”. Currently there is no specific privatisation law.
