The occupying side — Ankara and its installed proxies in the occupied north — protests at every move the Republic of Cyprus makes. They complain that they weren’t consulted, that they have no involvement or say in whatever Nicosia is planning. They push back against anything the Republic does: strategic energy projects, military infrastructure, bilateral agreements. They protest, they react, they threaten, they warn. About plans that, it should be said in passing, would benefit the country and every single one of its citizens.
And all of this while Turkey and its gauleiter in the occupied territory press ahead with entrenching the facts of occupation and executing a calculated programme of Turkification.
Central to that strategy is making the occupied north completely dependent on Turkey — a tool of control as much as of economics. This isn’t a recent development. It is a long-standing, systematic, methodical project, and one that meets no resistance in the north — because the dependency has been packaged as investment, as convenience, as an easier life. There has been no pushback, at any level, from the successive leaders of the occupation regime or from the political and party elite in the occupied territories. With the exception of Sener Levent — a publisher and journalist, not a politician — and a handful of others who risk their lives by standing up to the occupying power, among them Oz Karahan and his associates, the majority has chosen silence. Whether out of fear, or because they have ultimately concluded that going along with things is easier and more profitable. Turkish funding of projects, and the steady flow of money keeping the secessionist entity afloat, suits them well enough.
Within this framework sit the major strategic and geopolitical infrastructure projects: the planned gas pipelines running to and from the occupied north, and the electricity interconnection project that had been frozen for years. Before those came the underwater pipeline bringing fresh water from Turkey — at the time considered one of the largest such projects ever undertaken.
It is clear that beyond the economic dimension, the occupying power’s overriding priority is total dependency — making the occupied territories unable to survive without Turkish oxygen. The stranglehold Ankara exercises is now increasingly tied to cementing the permanence of the occupation itself. Building and deepening bonds of dependency deliberately undermines any prospect of a Cyprus settlement. At the same time, it lays the groundwork for a scenario that may not be openly declared but remains very much alive in Ankara’s thinking: the annexation of occupied Cyprus through Turkification.
Outright annexation, however, is far from straightforward for Turkey, which knows in advance the reaction it would provoke. The late Kyros Chrysostomidis noted in his book Analekta that Turkey “has always sought to seize and permanently retain control over the occupied part of Cyprus — and through it, over the whole island — but, mindful of the rules of international law governing the forcible annexation of territory and the climate of international opinion on the matter, has not to this day proceeded with an explicit annexation or incorporation of the occupied part of the Republic of Cyprus into its own sovereignty. It has tried indirectly…” And that indirect effort runs precisely through deepening dependency, while simultaneously pursuing the international upgrading of the secessionist entity.
The systematic entrenchment of the occupied north’s dependence on Turkey across critical sectors — water, energy, and beyond — is part of a design that is known and entirely visible. The role of Nicosia, on the other hand, is to build the conditions to deter and reverse Turkey’s expansionist ambitions against Cyprus.
