Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan on Tuesday called for an end to the “inhumane embargo” placed on Turkish Cypriots as he addressed his country’s parliament during discussions over his ministry’s budget for next year.

“Our top priorities include ensuring that the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus achieves its rightful place in the international community and lifting the inhumane embargo against the Turkish Cypriots. We maintain our determination to develop a positive agenda with Greece,” he said.

He added that his ministry is “continuing to defend the principle of equitable sharing in the eastern Mediterranean” and is “resolutely taking steps to protect our rights and interests”.

“We advocate for all Aegean disputes to be addressed holistically and for solutions to be found through meaningful and constructive dialogue within the framework of international law and good neighbourly relations. We want to see the Aegean sea and the eastern Mediterranean as regions of stability and prosperity,” he said.

Absent from Fidan’s address to the Turkish parliament, and from his speech to the parliamentary budget committee over his ministry’s budget last month, was any reference to a two-state solution to the Cyprus problem, with newspaper Aydinlik describing this absence as “noteworthy”.

The change in tone comes after Tufan Erhurman, who advocates for a federal solution to the Cyprus problem, was elected as Turkish Cypriot leader in a landslide election victory in October, unseating incumbent Ersin Tatar, who, with the full backing of Ankara, had advocated for a two-state solution throughout his five-year tenure in office.

Earlier in the day, his AK Party’s spokesman Omer Celik had been less conciliatory in his remarks regarding a deal struck by the Republic of Cyprus and Lebanon last month delimiting the two countries’ maritime exclusive economic zones (EEZ) in the Levantine sea – a move Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots say runs roughshod over the Turkish Cypriots’ rights to a say in such affairs.

Omer Celik

“What the Greek Cypriot administration in southern Cyprus is doing is pure occupation. It is nothing else. This is an attempt to usurp the sovereign rights of the TRNC. Any approach which tries to ignore the TRNC and ignore Turkey will have no future here,” Celik said on Tuesday.

He also offered criticism for the increased military ties the Republic of Cyprus has pursued with other countries, saying that “they have been trying to transform the Greek Cypriot side from a region where Greek Cypriots live into a military base and headquarters for some countries”.

Returning to the issue of Lebanon, he said that “some commentators are claiming” that the European Union’s €1 billion aid package for Lebanon, announced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, is “at stake”, and that to this end, “the Greek Cypriot side is trying to exploit Lebanon here”.

He then spoke of “reports suggesting that an approach akin to this occupation, a Mediterranean agreement encompassing the entire Mediterranean” with the exception of Turkey, “will be put forward” when Cyprus holds the Council of the EU’s rotating presidency between January and June.

Were such an agreement to come about, he said, it would be “illegitimate from our perspective”.

“The European Union has been unable to resist the arrogance of the Greek Cypriot administration in southern Cyprus for years. It has been dragged along by this arrogance, but at this point in the world, this arrogance is no longer limited to the Greek Cypriot administration. It would mean dealing a major blow to the main pillars of the EU’s security architecture,” he said.

To this end, he said that “we will not allow the sovereign rights of the TRNC to be ignored, nor can we create and implement a scenario where Turkey is ignored in this way”.

“The TRNC always has the right to declare its jurisdiction in the Mediterranean, areas which will define its own sovereignty. However, as United Nations resolutions clearly demonstrate, this behaviour of the Greek Cypriot administration in southern Cyprus is clearly an approach tantamount to occupation,” he said.