The real motives behind Niyazi Kızılyürek’s removal from the University of Cyprus are well known

 

3 February 2022, AKEL C.C. Press Office, Nicosia

No one can overlook the real motives of those who played a leading role in the removal of Turkish Cypriot MEP Niyazi Kızılyürek from the University of Cyprus.

This targeting began in 2019, from the day Niyazi Kızılyürek participated in the AKEL candidate list. He was targeted on two fronts: both by the chauvinist circles of the Turkish Cypriot community in the occupied territories, who vilified him as a “traitor, an agent of the Greeks”, and by the Greek Cypriot Right and far-right, who accused him of being an “agent of Erdogan”. No one can forget the attack launched against him back then by the leadership of the ruling DISY party and far-right ELAM.

They are the same people who, from the day of his election, were systematically exerting pressure on the University to force the removal of the academic AKEL MEP. And they succeeded in doing so – by focusing on trivial things – on the basis of an article of an anachronistic, possibly unconstitutional, discriminatory legislation which, as everyone says, must be changed.

This development has confirmed the nationalist allergies of the Greek Cypriot right.