Turkey’s vision of Cyprus as its satrapy by Marios L. Evriviades | Jerusalem Post

12/23/2014 - Cyprus cannot on its own deal with its Goliath neighbor. It does not have to. It can, within the international system and its dynamics, pursue a Lilliputian strategy and effectively tie down Gulliver

Turkey’s vision of Cyprus is that of a satrapy. A Turkish satrapy. It does not extend beyond that. If this thesis is understood and accepted then the past and present policies of Ankara vis as vis Cyprus, be they those of the Kemalists or of today’s Islamists, can be decoded and made “sense” of. It will explain why Turkey can submit a 100-page brief to the European Commission, as Ankara did recently, developing a convoluted array of arguments to prove that one state-member of the European Union, Cyprus, does not in fact exist. The Turks are talking about a country that for six months in 2012 presided over an EU that Turkey aspires to join. One does wonder whether the Turkish Foreign Ministry prepared its EU brief on its own volition and by observation, or whether it took its cue from the pronouncement of its leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who a few weeks back announced, to an unaware world, that “there is no such country called Cyprus.”