“Is there an embargo on the vaccine too?”

The Cyprus Turkish Chamber of Commerce, the Cyprus Turkish Chamber of Industry, the Cyprus Turkish Building Contractors Association and the Cyprus Turkish Hoteliers Association have come together as the Economic Organizations Platform (EOP) and have organized an action on the grounds that the Covid-19 vaccines sent by the European Union (EU) for the whole of Cyprus are not fairly distributed according to the population.

At the action held at the Metehan Border Gate, banners were unveiled that read “Calling the European Commission to duty”, “European Union do not condone this injustice”, “Embargo on vaccines too?” “Discrimination in vaccine supply is unacceptable”.

In the declaration read on behalf of the platform in Turkish and in English, the denial of the transfer of vaccines to the Turkish Cypriots from the amount of the vaccines provided by the European Union to Cyprus was condemned.

In the declaration, it was stated that according to the information obtained from reliable sources such as the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, it can be surmised that the EU sent 482,965 doses of vaccine to Cyprus, and as per the population ratio, more than 100 thousand doses of these vaccines should be transferred to Northern Cyprus, but that the amount of vaccine sourced from the EU which reached the North was only 30,050 (6.2%).

Reminding that access to the vaccine is both a human right and a fundamental requirement for the Turkish Cypriot people to carry out their economic activities under various embargoes, the declaration continued as follows:

“Greek Cypriot officials and European Union officials, who demonstrate an effort to announce that Turkish Cypriots are ‘EU citizens’ at every opportunity, seem to have forgotten our ‘EU citizenship’ even when the issue is about the measures to be taken against the epidemic. We call on the EU officials and the Greek Cypriot Administration to be transparent and thoughtful in the distribution of the vaccine provided to Cyprus, and demand that the injustice in its distribution be corrected immediately.”