NICOSIA: Greek Cyprus is preparing to take Türkiye’s proposed undersea gas pipeline to Turkish Cyprus before European Union foreign ministers, arguing that the project violates its sovereignty and casts doubt on Ankara’s stated ambition to one day join the bloc.
Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos said he would brief his EU counterparts on a memorandum of understanding signed between Türkiye and Turkish Cyprus for a pipeline linking Türkiye’s southern coast with Northern Cyprus, reported by Hurriyet Daily News. The agreement, he said, was a “clear violation of international law and the sovereign rights of the Republic of Cyprus.”
Kombos described the pipeline plan as part of what he called a wider pattern of Turkish activity in the eastern Mediterranean. Speaking before the EU Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Luxembourg, he said Cyprus had reported 659 violations of its airspace and exclusive economic zone to the United Nations in July and August alone.
The dispute comes at a delicate moment for the divided island. On Oct. 13, Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhürman met Greek Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides in the United Nations-controlled buffer zone that separates the island’s two communities.
Their talks focused on confidence-building measures proposed by U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres during his visit to Cyprus in late July. In a social media post before the meeting, Erhürman said the two leaders would discuss the seven measures put forward by the U.N. chief, adding that six had already been accepted.
“We are going into the meeting with the aim of holding a results-oriented discussion,” Erhürman said.
It was the leaders’ first meeting since their separate engagements on the Cyprus issue in New York. They had previously met on Sept. 17.
Following his contacts in the United States, Erhürman stressed the need to address the seven confidence building proposals raised by the U.N. secretary-general. For Nicosia, however, the pipeline dispute has added a new layer of tension to an island still divided more than five decades after its partition.
