Tuesday, January 23, 2018

AKEL condemns attack on "Afrika" newspaper: "The moral perpetrator is President Erdogan himself"

AKEL C.C. Press Office, 22nd January 2018, Nicosia.

AKEL denounces today’s attacks by extreme nationalist forces against the “Afrika” newspaper in the occupied areas. The moral perpetrator of the attacks is the Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan himself, whose recent references in Bursa bluntly targeted the newspaper “Afrika”.

As AKEL, we express our solidarity with Sener Levent and the newspaper “Afrika”, which is once again being targeted because it dared to refer to Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus on the occasion of Turkey’s ongoing invasion of Syria’s Arfin region.

Behind the demonstrations with an aggressive character appear to be mainly settlers who are aligned to the Justice and Development Party (AKP), as well as several ultra-right elements. We express our solidarity with the Turkish Cypriot progressive forces that oppose these attacks, but also stand against the invasion of Syria.

In general, these events further highlight yet another way by which Ankara is trying to further impose itself on the Turkish Cypriot community and transfer its internal problems to Cyprus and in doing so consequently reaffirming that only the solution of the Cyprus problem can free the Cypriot people as a whole from every kind of intervention by Turkey in Cyprus.