Ersin Tatar, president of unrecognised Turkish republic, says north will otherwise become more dependent on Turkey
Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus will become ever more dependent on, and the hydrocarbon reserves surrounding Cyprus could be left unexploited, unless a solution to the 50-year dispute over the partitioned island is reached soon, Ersin Tatar, the president of the unrecognised “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”, has said.
Tatar, a rightwing nationalist elected in 2020 with the direct support of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, claims to be trying to change that. He has broken from previous Turkish Cypriot policy by proposing a two-state solution in which the two sides of the island would remain permanently divided with equal sovereign status.
Tatar’s critics say his two-state plan is a nonstarter and instead of giving Turkish Cypriots greater sovereignty, his strategy risks turning the isolated north of Cyprus in effect into an economic colony of Ankara, something that will eventually threaten the north’s prized secular status. Tatar sees Turkey as the motherland. “Whenever we have been kicked around or suffered, Turkey always came to save us,” he said. “Turkey sacrificed her own children for our security. We feel part of the Turkish race. In 1974, the Turkish army came as a protectorate, and now we, Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots have overlapping interests.”
Long-running disputes over hydrocarbons in the eastern Mediterranean also provide Tatar with a lever. Tatar said: “Any deals made by Greek Cypriots with big petrol companies are absolutely illegal since they should have our consent as the co-founders of Cyprus. His aides said the value of the hydrocarbons in the east Mediterranean was time-limited, and if the status of Cyprus was deadlocked, the hydrocarbons risked being left untapped as governments moved on to greener technology such as solar.
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