KKTC receives surprise support from Italian deputies

Italian Transnational Radical Party deputy Maurizio Turco, a former member of the European Parliament, and Marco Pedruca, a member of the party council, applied for citizenship in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (KKTC) while visiting for the 33rd anniversary of the 1974 military intervention, celebrated as Peace and Freedom Day.

They did it as a reaction to the EU’s failure to keep its promises to the Turkish Cypriots, they said at a press conference held after submitting their citizenship petitions to KKTC Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Turgay Avcı.

“We are here to make a call for immediate termination of the isolation of the island’s north and a re-launching of the search for a federal solution through high-level political dialogue,” they said.

Criticizing the EU as waiting for the economic collapse of the Turkish Cypriots rather than making efforts to implement a political solution, the Italian politicians added:

“This is not a provocation or intended to prove anything, but it is being done to ensure that after the Greek Cypriots voted against the UN referendum in 2004.”

Ankara does not recognize the Greek Cypriot government, which entered the EU in May 2004 as the official representative of the entire island. In 1983 the KKTC unilaterally declared its independence, though it remains recognized only by Ankara.

Turkish Cypriots are not able to exercise the EU rights granted to Greek Cypriots, and international peace efforts have been virtually frozen since the Greek Cypriots voted down a UN reunification plan shortly before joining the EU.

In April 2004 the European Commission proposed the regulation of direct trade and financial assistance to reward the Turkish Cypriots for their willingness for reunification.

Yet the EU’s direct trade proposal was apparently suspended in 2006 when EU member states agreed to decouple it from a financial aid scheme, without a hint as to when the direct trade regulation would again be taken up.