Turkey

Speaking in the Turkish parliament, the country’s Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said, referring to the ongoing International Conference on Cyprus, that “we are talking about a united...

  As we explained in a previous article posted here a post-modern, still very real coup d' etat is now executed, with the aim of...

  AC London BBC Complaints PO Box 1922 Darlington DL3 0UR 17 January 2017 Dear Sir or Madam, It is with regret that I find myself writing to the BBC once again on...

Andreas Theophanous* December 2016 The alternative proposal for the Cyprus problem The narrative of the recent years was that any solution of the Cyprus problem based on...

In 1974 Kissinger was able to prepare his Cyprus coup first by deceiving everybody about his real intentions, including the Greek dictator Ioannides, Archbishop Makarios and Soviet FM Gromyko (when he met both of them in Nicosia weeks before the coup), the British government and even his own President Richard Nixon, probably exploiting his serious troubles with Watergate.

As yet another ‘High Noon’ looms over Cyprus, with the usual Western/NATO threats about this being the last chance for a solution, let us consider the rôle of Henry Kissinger, without whom it is highly unlikely that Turkey would have dared to invade and occupy Cyprus in the first place. Before we specify how he procrastinated and slithered to allow Turkey the space it needed to invade, we need some brief background to illustrate his obsession with Cyprus, and his delaying tactics following the Turkish invasion.

In Politics, Aristotle issued a timeless warning: ‘Man, when perfected, is the best of animals but, when separated from law and justice, he is...

“Great work has been done in cooperation with our partners from Turkey. We know that only recently there was a trilateral meeting in Moscow of the foreign ministers of Russia, Turkey, and Iran, where all of the nations made obligations not only to control, but also to act as guarantors of the peace process in Syria.”

Turkey jailed more journalists than any other country this year. According to the Turkish Journalists' Association, 148 journalists are currently imprisoned and many media outlets have been shut down.

Modern Turkey is a strange amalgam of Western structures underpinned by Ottoman habits. Their various governments, whether military or not, are still heavily influenced by its huge military, and the contradiction between religion and secularism stills bedevils its development. Russia knows this, and knows that the bazaar mentality prevails in Turkish foreign policy. Rather than provoke a collapse of the shaky Turkish state, Russia prefers to weaken a neurotic NATO, and eventually bring Turkey into its sphere of influence, in the interests of Middle Eastern stability.