Cyprus celebrates 62 years of independence but also lives the 48th year of occupation of the north of the island by the Turkish army. Evagoras Mavromatis, president of the Cypriot community in France and in Europe is the guest of “Micro européen”.
franceinfo: Since 1974, Turkey has occupied the north of the island of Cyprus and we talk about it very little…
Evagoras Mavromatis: You mean not at all? It’s true, Turkey has been there for 48 years, it invaded the country. We have, in Cyprus, 200,000 refugees in our own country, we had almost 10,000 dead. We have missing persons, until today, we are looking for mass graves to find out which families the bodies belong to. And the Turkish army is not making it easy for us. And families have to live. Basically, the parents are looking for the dead children, and where they’ve been buried for 48 years. It is a human drama. Turkey today occupies the country, and its goal is to control all of Cyprus.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly threatens Cyprus, openly Greece, while playing a kind of pivotal role of “Mr Good Offices” in European and Central Asian geopolitical news…
Erdogan, he moves everywhere, he allows himself to give lessons, we saw it recently. Besides, he said that no invasion is justified. At the UN last week, he made it clear he is for two states, that is to say a Cypriot-Tuc state, and a Cypriot-Greek state. Beyond, it also claims half of the Aegean Sea. He says: the Greek islands are occupied by Greece and he wants them “release”.
He … not does not recognize maritime exclusive economic zones. When we are in the Aegean Sea, we often see Greek hunters or Greek frigates pass by, because we know that the Turks are not far away?
Not only that, he is invading Greek airspace. Last week it violated Greek airspace 29 times. It does not recognize what is called in Greek “Laos”, the exclusive economic zone of Greece and Cyprus.
The exclusive economic zone, it is recalled, is the legal maritime space of a State…
Well, he is clearly threatening us, he is threatening to occupy Cyprus. We are a very small country, we do not have the military power to resist Turkey, we are going to resist but it is disproportionate. Turkey, it still has 45,000 soldiers in Cyprus, in the occupied part, it is the most militarized part in the world.
Well, Turkey is there; today we have the invasion of the Russians in Ukraine, and we see Turkey playing the mediator. Erdogan himself occupies a country, and he plays the mediator. But the most serious thing is the position of the Europeans. They accepted that Cyprus and Greece do not demand any condemnation from Turkey, that’s a scandal, we can’t understand it. It’s two weights, two measures. Turkey is untouchable, it is unpunished.
Especially 2023 for Mr. Erdogan is the big date: presidential election, legislative elections and the centenary of the Turkish Republic. So he has to act, he wants to act because he has to win the election?
That’s it, and one way to win is to make an incident, or war with Greece, or war with Cyprus, so that he can reunite his electorate, that’s it. And we see more and more concrete threats with Erdogan.
This is the reason why also the Greek and Cypriot communities are in solidarity with the Armenians, since Armenia attacked by Azerbaijan, we never talk about it, but we never talk about Cyprus either?
But of course, we are in solidarity, we are waging the same fight with the Armenians, and that does not date from today: we are victims of the same occupier, we have been victims of Turkish barbarism for more than a century, and it continues today. We saw what happened in Nagorno-Karabakh and no one talks about it anymore, and that is what is happening in Cyprus. Nobody talks about it. Turkey violates Greece’s airspace on a daily basis, but no one talks about it.