Wed 03 June 2020:
Turkey will continue protecting its rights and interests in the Mediterranean without any compromise, the country’s National Security Council said on Tuesday.
“Negative approaches of some actors, who met on the common ground against Turkey, regarding Turkey’s legitimate and legal steps in the Mediterranean were evaluated, and it is stated that protection of our country’s rights and interests in land, sea, and air will continue without any compromise,” the council, headed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said in a statement issued following its meeting.
The area falls entirely within the Turkish continental shelf registered with the UN and under permit licenses, the Turkish government in previous years granted to the Turkish Petroleum Corporation, the country’s national oil company.
Turkey wants to see energy as an incentive for a political resolution on the island and peace in the wider Mediterranean basin rather than a catalyst for further tensions.
Turkey is a guarantor nation for the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) and has consistently contested the Greek Cypriot administration’s unilateral drilling in the Eastern Mediterranean, asserting that the TRNC also has rights to the resources in the area.
In 1974, following a coup aimed at the annexation of Cyprus by Greece, Ankara had to intervene as a guarantor power. In 1983, the TRNC was founded.
-AA
File Photo: Journalists walk next to the drilling ship ‘Yavuz’ scheduled to search for oil and gas off Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus at the port of Dilovasi outside Istanbul, on June 20, 2019. (AFP)
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