YUSUF KANLI

Semantics and symbols YUSUF KANLI

Semantics and symbols

Semantics and symbols have always been important, particularly for the eastern societies. How an issue is presented. How a person sits or walks. The words he decides to use in describing an issue. They are often more important than the substance.

July 24 2019
Time for change YUSUF KANLI

Time for change

According to some pundits, the Cyprus talks process may resume soon “from the point” they collapsed two years ago in Crans-Montana because of Greek Cypriot greed. In the first week of August, the two communal leaders are slated to come together, provided Greek Cypriot leader Nikos Anastasiades, who fell and fractured his hip, recovers sufficiently enough. At a later date, it is being whispered around that a five-party conference will convene and a new process will kick off. As the two leaders agreed in principle to the convening of a five-party conference, it appears there are not many stones in the way.

July 22 2019
EU is becoming irrelevant in Cyprus YUSUF KANLI

EU is becoming irrelevant in Cyprus

The European Union is insisting on becoming irrelevant in the Cyprus issue despite repeated assertions of hoping to have a role in the resolution on the island.

July 17 2019
Some sort of equality YUSUF KANLI

Some sort of equality

We are experiencing some very interesting days. For example, how many people know that the two sides on Cyprus have silently managed to put into action a “roaming arrangement” enabling mobile phone operators of the two sides to provide their customers the chance to use their phones in each other’s territories?

July 15 2019
Will a new era open YUSUF KANLI

Will a new era open?

These Greeks are hopeless. They just cannot learn. Population-wise Istanbul might be bigger than the whole of Greece, yet it is just a city. Still, it took almost three months and a rerun election for those at the helm of power in Turkey to concede electoral defeat and hand over the city to an opposition candidate. Incumbent leftwing Syriza party leader and outgoing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras calling Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the leader of the center-right New Democracy Party, and conceding defeat while the vote-counting was still continuing, was amateurish. He, and other like-minded Greek politicians, must be taken to a crash course on power politics, if not democracy.

July 08 2019
Time to reconsider Syria policy YUSUF KANLI

Time to reconsider Syria policy

The fundamental duty of senior advisers, particularly those advising top political figures on key foreign and defense policy issues, must be to try to prevent policymakers from making sentimental, emotional and indeed prejudiced decisions. Leaders might have their own perceptions and indeed prejudices, but countries like Turkey that have centuries of state traditions and rich history of political conduct under very tense conditions — rather than individual aspirations, hopes, plans or prejudices and national interests — ought to dominate the decision-making mechanism.

July 03 2019
Greek Cypriots must wake up YUSUF KANLI

Greek Cypriots must wake up

For more than two decades, at various formats Turkey and the Turkish Cypriot leadership have been warning Greek Cypriots that unilateral exploitation of the potential hydrocarbon riches off the island would be a blatant breach of the terms of the 1960 agreements that created a bi-communal Cyprus Republic from a British colony.

June 26 2019
Quo vadis Turkey YUSUF KANLI

Quo vadis Turkey?

The much-anticipated and unexpectedly strong reelection of Ekrem İmamoğlu to the seat of Istanbul metropolitan mayoral post will most probably be remembered in the years ahead as a turning point in the history of Turkish democracy.

June 24 2019
Will North Cyprus open Varosha to settlement YUSUF KANLI

Will North Cyprus open Varosha to settlement?

Was it an unexpected move? Might be for most people but not for those people aware of the 2015 presidential election pledges of the People’s Party leader, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Kudret Özersay, or aware of the strong demand from among the grassroots of the National Unity Party of Prime Minister Ersin Tatar to end decades of “indecision” regarding Varosha’s future.

June 19 2019