Turkish minister calls to lift international sanctions on Northern Cyprus

Turkey’s minister for EU affairs and chief negotiator, Volkan Bozkir, has criticised economic sanctions imposed on the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and called to remove them, Anadolu news agency reported.

Bozkir stressed during his Wednesday meeting with the heads of the Turkish-Cypriot Chambers of Commerce and Industry in the capital Nicosia that Turkey will continue to exert pressure to rid Northern Cyprus from all sanctions and to find a solution to resolve the crisis on the island.

“We are determined to lift these restrictions and obstacles that isolate the Turkish part of the island from the outside world and prevent it from having normal trade relations”, Bozakir said.

The Turkish minister held several meetings with officials in Northern Cyprus including the parliament speaker, the prime minister and the foreign minister in which they discussed ways to solve the current crisis. Bozakir said the Cypriot crisis will be a major subject on the meeting agenda between Ankara and Athens during the next few weeks.

The island of Cyprus has been split between Turkish Cypriots in the north and Greek Cypriots in the south since 1974. In 2004, Greek Cypriots rejected a UN plan to unite the divided island.

The president of Turkish Cypriots, Derviş Eroğlu, and his Greek counterpart Nicos Anastasiades adopted a joint declaration on 11 February paving the way for the resumption of negotiations under the UN auspices to settle the Cypriot crisis. This was after the last round of talks stopped in March 2011 following the failure to agree on issues such as power-sharing and the rights of property and land.

As part of the announcement, the two Cypriot leaders met on 17 September in the island’s buffer zone and agreed to resume talks. But the Greek leader announced in October that he withdrew from the ongoing peace talks after Turkey sent warships to locations where Greek Cypriots where searching for gas in the Mediterranean.