As Turkish Cyprus prepares to mark the 52nd anniversary of Türkiye’s 1974 Peace Operation on July 20, Turkish Cypriot Foreign Minister Tahsin Ertuğruloğlu has said that the country will not abandon Ankara’s right to intervene on the island.
Speaking ahead of the anniversary, Ertuğruloğlu reiterated that Ankara’s guarantor rights under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee remain indispensable for the security of Turkish Cypriots, stressing that neither Türkiye nor Turkish Cyrus would accept any arrangement requiring them to relinquish those rights.
Türkiye launched the 1974 Peace Operation following a coup backed by the military junta in Greece that sought to unite Cyprus with Greece.
Ankara carried the operation to restore constitutional order and protect the Turkish Cypriot community after years of intercommunal violence.
Ertuğruloğlu said the core of the Cyprus dispute is not territorial but political, arguing that the international community has continued to recognize the Greek Cypriot administration as the sole legitimate authority on the island while attempting to reduce Turkish Cypriots to the status of a minority.
“As our founding president Rauf Denktaş repeatedly emphasized, Cyprus is fundamentally a question of status,” he said.
“The Greek Cypriot side is treated as the exclusive owner of a Hellenic island, while the Turkish side is expected to accept minority status. If you sit at the negotiating table without equality, you will leave it without equality. That is precisely why six decades of negotiations have produced no lasting settlement.”
The foreign minister argued that the United Nations laid the foundations for the current deadlock by continuing to recognize the Greek Cypriot administration as the “Republic of Cyprus” after the constitutional partnership collapsed in 1963. He said the European Union compounded that mistake by admitting Cyprus as a full member in 2004 despite the unresolved conflict.
“The U.N. made that mistake, and the European Union repeated it in 2004,” Ertuğruloğlu said. “Now they expect us to legitimize those mistakes. That is simply not going to happen.”
He also rejected the EU’s role in the peace process, saying Brussels cannot be regarded as an impartial actor as long as it approaches the Cyprus issue through what he described as the narrative of a “Turkish occupation.”
The remarks came as U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is preparing to visit Cyprus on July 27-29 in his latest effort to revive peace talks that have remained effectively frozen since the collapse of the Crans-Montana negotiations in 2017.
According to media reports, the visit will be the first by a sitting U.N. secretary-general in more than 16 years, following Ban Ki-moon’s trip to the island in 2010.
