Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and TRNC Foreign Minister Tahsin Ertugruloglu launched an IT infrastructure project to be set up at the TRNC foreign ministry.
The project includes ensuring secure electronic correspondence within the ministry and with the representations offices abroad as well as electronically archiving the documents which have been in the ministry’s archives since 1975.
In statements during the inauguration ceremony, Cavusoglu said that thanks to the solidarity between Turkey and the TRNC they could continue their “Cyprus cause”. Today, he said, is the best example of Turkey’s solidarity and that this also exists between the TRNC representation offices abroad and the Turkish embassies.
Cavusoglu said that that Turkey and the TRNC are working to increase the number of representation offices and to improve the working conditions of the employees in these offices. He noted that the shortage of personnel in the TRNC’s representation offices should be addressed and added that they are holding contacts to overcome this deficit. They are liaising to hire 20 people to cover these needs.
According to Cavusoglu, the Turkish Foreign Ministry should also be strengthened after the “Fethullah Gülen (FETO) incidents”. He noted that Turkey has 65 million documents in digital form and is happy to share these with the “daughter land.”
Referring to the Cyprus problem, Cavusoglu reiterated that Turkey will continue supporting the TRNC in its quest to find a lasting and just solution and asserted that they will continue being one step ahead, as they had been during the Annan Plan period. “It is one of our fundamental duties as motherland to protect Turkish Cypriot people’s interests”, he argued.
TRNC Foreign Minister Ertugruloglu said that the two ministries had signed a cooperation and operation protocol in 1998, according to which, they had cooperated in fields such as personnel education, exchange of personnel etc. He noted that the TRNC has 24 representation offices abroad and it will increase their number in the forthcoming period. Therefore, rapid, continuous and reliable communication and sharing of information and documents is very important, he said. In this regard, he added, a protocol was signed with Turkey in August 2015 to benefit from Ankara’s experience in the field of information technology.
Havadis
