Former Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat, who served in post between 2005 and 2010, on Tuesday expressed surprise at the ongoing detention of five Greek Cypriots who were arrested in the north last month, two of whom were remanded in custody for three months last week.
“I’ve only seen three-month remands for murders,” he said, before warning the incumbent Turkish Cypriot leadership against further escalating the situation.
“If you create an atmosphere of retaliation, the Greek Cypriot side has more options. Because the vast majority of the construction industry in the north operates on Greek Cypriot property. It is not like that in the south,” he said.
He also stressed that both the arrest of the five Greek Cypriots in the north and the arrests made by the Republic of Cyprus of people who stand accused of developing Greek Cypriot land in the north are direct consequences of a lack of a solution to the Cyprus problem.
“These recent developments, including the trials in the south of Simon Aykut and other foreign nationals, including Germans, Hungarians, and others alleged to be estate agents, and the recent arrest of Greek Cypriots in the north, demonstrate that the property issue is part of the Cyprus problem,” he said.
“In other words, the property issue cannot be resolved without resolving the Cyprus problem.”
He then added that one of the reasons behind the escalating situation regarding property is “approaches which distance themselves from the possibility of a solution”, saying that such approaches “complicate the process”.
“This also demonstrates something else: if you put forward goals which are almost impossible to achieve, such as a two-state solution, you will complicate the situation even further,” he said.
As such, he said, “if we focus on resolving the Cyprus problem, these arrests and attacks will also end”.
“This has never happened in the past. Have enough Greek Cypriots not come to see their own property? Have we arrested them? We have not,” he said.
Talat is not the first former Turkish Cypriot leader to have expressed reservations regarding the arrest and detention of the five Greek Cypriots, with Mustafa Akinci, who served in post between 2015 and 2020, having described the matter as a “tit-for-tat situation”.
He said the situation constitutes “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The mentality of ‘if you arrest a contractor, we will do the same’”.
“There can be no room for ‘tit-for-tat’ in the law of a place which claims statehood and, moreover, is purportedly seeking recognition,” he said.
The five Greek Cypriots were arrested in the village of Galatia, near Trikomo, on July 19, and have remained in custody since then. Two of the five were handed three-month remands at a court in Trikomo last Thursday, facing charges of privacy violations, trespassing, and breaching the peace.
Then, all five were handed 13-day remands at a military court in northern Nicosia in the early hours of Saturday morning, with one standing accused of having entered the north illegally, and the other four accused of aiding and abetting that crime.
On Monday, two Turkish Cypriots who stand accused of aiding and abetting the Greek Cypriots also appeared in court, and were both remanded in custody for three days.
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