The Turkish Kemalist state of the Young Turks of the 20th century was built on a fire and iron policy of annihilation of other ethnicities and on the violent turkification of those who … survived. Thus, central state plans were implemented for the mass extermination of other ethnic groups and peoples within Turkey i.e. genocides, ethnic cleansing, famine, and exiles in forced death marches and work camps. Subsequently, an oppressive policy of turkification was imposed through an ultranationalist Turkish educational system, public prosecution with banning of any other language, forced disintegration of concentrated ethnic populations, the demolition of thousands of Kurdish villages and uprooting of their residents and so on. The Turkish Kemalist regime of the 20th century considered it as serving its own interest to operate a showcase of political parties, while the real power was exercised by the top army leadership. This was known as the ‘Deep State’ in Turkey, which ruled the internal and external important issues of the country. When the Deep State committed crimes (i.e. torturing and killing of Kurds), the perpetrators acted under the orders of the military leadership.

In recent weeks, a mafia boss has been exposing old and recent deep ‘dirty work’ of the Turkish state, highlighting that the current islamo-fascist Erdogan regime has further ‘deepened’ the Deep State, turning it into an organized criminal mafia state. The accident in Susurluk (1996) where a member of Turkish parliament, police and military officials, and an internationally known criminal were found in the same car, was already known. Another particularly frequent tool of Turkish central state planning, applied in Cyprus, was the burning and desecration of Turkish monuments and mosques acting under the orders of the Turkish Deep State, in order to stir up hatred against the Greeks of Cyprus. Moreover, after 1974, the murders of the Turkish Cypriot journalist Koutlou Antali, the human rights activist Greek Cypriot Theofilos Georgiades, and the persecution and attempted lynching of the Turkish Cypriot journalist Şener Levent, were ‘operations’ of the same criminal Turkish state. In the current Turkish Erdogan regime, the criminal record has been ‘elevated’ so that drug lords, illegal arms dealers, murderers, and gang rapists meet with top government officials to implement Erdogan's neo-ottoman policies.

Recent revelations also highlight the role of the Turkish occupation regime in the northern part of Cyprus, which is not limited to illegal money laundering through banks. Erdogan's organized mafia state uses the occupied part of the Republic of Cyprus to finance its dirty operations, evading detection and international control. Huge sums of organized mafia funds are secretly channeled to fund terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hamas.

The Deep State, which for decades has carried out systematic plans to exterminate indigenous peoples within Turkey, has evolved into the current state of an organized criminal mafia regime. With all that in mind, everyone should answer this question: Is this Turkish criminal state worthy of trust that it will honor its commitments and its signing of a possible agreement of settlement in Cyprus? Will this criminal mafia state withdraw its occupational military from Cyprus with a policy of incentives and gifts?

Costas Mavrides, MEP DIKO – S&D, is Chairman of the Political Committee for the Mediterranean.