| Sultans gotta sultan. |
... Turkey's version of Mohammed Morsi but they voted him back in so they deserve him. It's a sin, a shame, and a felony to insult the president of Turkey...has vowed that Ankara will increase rather than reduce its troops numbers in Cyprus, a move that could further set back attempts to reunify the divided Mediterranean island.
In comments published in
...just another cheapjack Moslem dictatorship, brought to you by the Moslem Brüderbund....
had no need for a naval base on Cyprus as mooted in some reports but could establish such a facility if it was necessary from a "psychological" point of view.
"No, we are not going to reduce the numbers of our troops. We will increase them, we are not going to decrease them," he told
He expressed impatience over the Cyprus issue, saying "this business would have been solved" if the Greek Cypriots had backed unification in an April 2004 referendum on a plan put forward by the late former U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan
...Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh and so far the worst Secretary-General of the UN. Annan and the UN were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize for something or other that probably sounded good at the time. In December 2004, reports surfaced that Kofi's son Kojo received payments from the Swiss company Cotecna, which had won a lucrative contract under the UN Oil-for-Food Program. Kofi Annan called for an investigation to look into the allegations, which stirred up the expected cesspool but couldn't seem to come up with enough evidence to indict Kofi himself, or even Kojo...While
"Henceforth we will implement the formula that we have declared for ourselves," said Erdogan, without elaborating.
Cyprus has been divided since the 1974
Turkey is believed to maintain around 35,000 troops in northern Cyprus, although the military does not give official figures.
The withdrawal -- or drastic reduction -- of Turkey's military presence is seen as key to any reunification plan being acceptable to the Greek Cypriot side.
Some conservative
But Erdogan said "we have no need to build a base there," noting that unlike Greece, Turkey was just "minutes away" from the coast of Cyprus.
But he appeared to leave the door open to such a move as a way of making a political statement.
"This issue just has a psychological dimension. In this respect, if we felt the need, we could establish a base. Our presence there is important," Erdogan said.
There were high hopes at the beginning of 2017 that U.N.-backed talks could clinch a breakthrough in the long-running stalemate on reuniting the island.
But the deadlock has not been broken and analysts say rapid progress is unlikely for the moment as Erdogan reaches out to the nationalist electorate in Turkey.