Famagusta mayor Alexis Galanos has called for mass participation in the event organized by the Municipality of Famagusta outside the Presidential Palace on Friday.

Galanos told a press conference that the announcement made by the so-called deputy prime minister and foreign minister Kudret Özersay in the Turkish occupied part of Cyprus to open the fenced off city of Varosha was a stabbing in the back of President Anastasiades with whom he had been eating a few days ago, but also of the efforts to restart the Cyprus talks.

He said that he considered Özersay the protagonist behind this move and that he expected Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akıncı to differentiate himself from it.

Galanos spoke of a violation of Security Council resolutions 550 and 789 as well as of the 1979 High Level Agreement between the then President of the Republic, Spyros Kyprianou, and the Turkish Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash.

The mayor of Famagusta noted that it was time the Government took action and announced that there will be a meeting with the President of the Republic on Friday at 18.45 to hand over to Anastasiades a statement about what they expect him to do. He noted that they expected the President to make representations to the UN security Council, the EU and elsewhere. He added that the Municipality of Famagusta will make representations itself to the embassies of the members of the Security Council and to political parties.

“It is a psychological warfare and a war of nerves that started with the violation of the sovereign rights of the Republic of Cyprus in the EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) and has now been extended to the issue of Famagusta. It is the promotion of plan B”, said Galanos.

“We will ask the President to make representations to the UN Security Council and to ask for the involvement of the UN Secretary-General to implement UN resolutions and decisions”, he added. We must not allow this to happen, it is illegal and unfair, he noted.

Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkish troops invaded and occupied 37% of its territory.

Varosha, the fenced – off part of the once thriving holiday resort of Famagusta, on the eastern coast of Cyprus, has been sealed since the 1974 Turkish invasion and according to the UN, the Turkish military is responsible for it. Repeated attempts to hand the area to UN administration and its Greek Cypriot legal inhabitants have so far failed due to the stance of the Turkish army.

UNSC resolution 550 (1984) ‘considers attempts to settle any part of Varosha by people other than its inhabitants as inadmissible and calls for the transfer of this area to the administration of the United Nations’.