Whose fault is it ? For the Turkish president, the peacekeepers are responsible for the incident which occurred on Friday in Cyprus, where the UN accused Turkish Cypriot forces of having attacked them on the divided island.
“The intervention of blue helmets (…) is inadmissible for us. (…) With their intervention towards the villagers and their inappropriate statements, the peacekeepers undermined their impartiality and their already damaged reputation,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday. “Preventing the access of the Turkish Cypriots of Pyla to their own land is illegal and inhumane”, added the Turkish Head of State.
Return to calm, precarious
An uneasy calm reigns in the buffer zone on the divided island. The incident, one of the most serious in several years, has drawn widespread international condemnation. He performed in Pyla (Pile in Turkish), the only village where Greek and Turkish Cypriots live side by side, on the UN-monitored Green Line.
The buffer zone, or Green Line, divides the island between the Republic of Cyprus, a member of the European Union and exercising its authority in the south, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), self-declared and recognized only by Turkey. , which invaded the northern third of the island in 1974 in response to a coup d’etat by Cypriot-Greek nationalists wishing to reunite the country with Greece.
The UN said four peacekeepers were injured and their vehicles damaged while trying to block “unauthorized construction work” near Pyla.