Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) President Ersin Tatar condemned the Greek Cypriot terror organization, EOKA, said Turkish Cypriot sources on Saturday.

In a written statement issued on the anniversary of the launch of EOKA’s armed attacks against the Turkish Cypriot people, Tatar said that the terror organization launched its attacks on April 1, 1955, to annex Cyprus to Greece, turning the island into a blood bath -- marking the beginning of decades of pain and suffering.

The organization, supported by the Greek Cypriot leadership, the Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church and Greece aimed to wipe out Turkish presence from the island, according to the statement.

“The main reason why the Turkish Resistance Organization (TMT) was formed was to protect the Turkish Cypriot people from these attacks,” said Tatar, highlighting that many Turkish Cypriot villages, places of worship and innocent Turkish Cypriot civilians were targeted by members of EOKA between 1955 and 1958.

He also maintained that following the establishment of the 1960 partnership Republic of Cyprus of which Turkish Cypriots were equal founding members, EOKA set out to implement the Akritas Plan, a covert plan to annihilate all Turkish presence in Cyprus.

“In December 1963, EOKA launched the ‘Bloody Christmas’ attacks in line with its plan to wipe out all Turkish presence from the island and to unite Cyprus with Greece. Again, hundreds of Turkish Cypriot villages were attacked between 1963 and 1974 and thousands of our people were displaced and forced to flee their homes,” the statement read.

Against this background, Greek Cypriot leader Nikos Anastasiades’ remarks, which glorified the EOKA terror organization, are dreadful, Tatar stressed.

Tatar called Anastasiades not to embrace the EOKA and distort the history to attack TMT, which fought for protecting Turkish Cypriots’ lives in the face of systematic terror attacks.

The island has been divided since 1964 when ethnic attacks forced Turkish Cypriots to withdraw into enclaves for their safety.

In 1974, a Greek Cypriot coup aiming at Greece’s annexation led to Turkey’s military intervention as a guarantor power to protect Turkish Cypriots from persecution and violence.

The TRNC was founded in 1983.

The Greek Cypriot administration entered the EU in 2004, the same year that Greek Cypriots thwarted the UN’s Annan Plan to end the decades-long dispute./aa

A total of 15 suspected members of the Fetullah Terrorist Organization (FETO) were remanded in custody in Turkey, a security source said on Saturday.

Fifteen of the 33 suspects, who had been arrested earlier as part of a probe into the terror group’s infiltration into the Turkish army, but later released by a Turkish court, remanded into custody following prosecutor's appeal, said a source, who asked not to be named due to restrictions on speaking to the media.

The prosecutor's office objected the release of 95 suspects who had been arrested during anti-terror operations held across 53 provinces in Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus on March 23.

Earlier, prosecutors in the Aegean Izmir province issued arrest warrants for 184 suspects, of which 123 are on-duty soldiers.

FETO and its US-based leader Fetullah Gulen orchestrated the defeated coup of July 15, 2016, which left 251 people martyred and 2,734 injured.

Ankara also accuses FETO of being behind a long-running campaign to overthrow the state through the infiltration of Turkish institutions, particularly the military, police, and judiciary./aa

Six cops, including one who led the assault, were killed as anti-coup protesters attacked a police post in Myanmar earlier this week, local media reported on Saturday.

Thang Hou Gin, a 25-year-old cop who joined the Civil Disobedience Movement against Myanmar’s junta, led protesters in the attack on the police outpost in Tamu, a township in the Sagaing region, on Thursday, according to news agency Myanmar Now.

Three hand grenades were hurled at the post, killing five police officers, the report said.

Gin was killed “about 200 meters from the outpost” when the “the military opened fire with machine guns” as the group of protesters was retreating, the Myanmar Now report cited a social worker as saying.

Meanwhile, thousands of people have left their homes in rural areas of Myanmar’s Magway state to escape the junta’s violent crackdown on anti-coup protesters.

According to activist group Justice for Myanmar, at least 10,000 people have taken refuge in forests in the region as soldiers have been raiding and looting properties and kidnapping civilians since the beginning of March.

Over 540 people have been killed in the junta’s brutal clampdown on protests against the military’s Feb. 1 power grab, according to various rights organizations./aa

Turkey will continue anti-terror operations with getting them “intensified,” the nation’s defense minister said on Saturday.

“Until when? Until the last terrorist is neutralized. Thus, we will save our noble nation from the terror scourge that has been going on for many years and we will ensure security,” Hulusi Akar said.

He addressed the Turkish commanders on the borderline and beyond via video link during his visit to the southeastern Sirnak province bordering Iraq with Turkish generals.

“It will contribute not only to our security, but also to the security of Iraq, our friendly and brotherly country, so it will enable the peace and security to arrive at the region quickly,” Akar added.

“We are waiting for what is needed to be done to neutralize them as soon as possible,” he said, referring to terrorists in Sinjar and Makhmur, northern Iraq.

Akar said Turkey is coordinating with Iraq on this issue and it already expressed readiness for cooperation.

“We believe that our Iraqi neighbors will do whatever is necessary in this regard and we are following this closely,” he added.

The Sinjar deal, inked under the auspices of the UN in October last year between the central government in Baghdad and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) on the status of the region, seeks to clear the region of the PKK terrorists.

The PKK terror group managed to establish a foothold in Sinjar in 2014 under the pretext of protecting the Ezidi community from Daesh/ISIS terrorists.

In its more than 30-year terror campaign against Turkey, the PKK – listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the US, and EU – has been responsible for the deaths of nearly 40,000 people, including women, children, and infants.

Greece escalates tension

On relations with Greece, Akar said: “We continue to carry out our extremely reasonable and logical policies without any problems and in full speed.”

“Despite our constructive, positive, peaceful, and negotiable attitude, unfortunately, the provocative actions of our Greek neighbors continue,” he said, blaming Greece for escalating the tension in the region.

Tensions have been running high for months in the Eastern Mediterranean as Greece has disputed Turkey's rights to energy exploration.

Turkey -- the country with the longest coastline on the Mediterranean -- sent out drill ships to explore for energy on its continental shelf, asserting its rights in the region as well as those of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.

Greece has made maximalist maritime territorial boundary claims based on small islands just kilometers off the Turkish coast. To reduce tensions, Ankara has called for dialogue and negotiations to ensure fair sharing of the region's resources./aa

An area of pristine rainforest the size of the Netherlands was burned or hacked down last year, as the destruction of the planet’s tropical forests accelerated despite a global economic slowdown, according to research on March 31.

The worst losses were in Brazil, three times higher than the next highest country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to a report from Global Forest Watch based on satellite data.

Across the tropics, the study registered the destruction in 2020 of 4.2 million hectares (10.4 million acres) of primary forest - 12 percent higher than the year before.

Ecosystems straddling the equator shelter abundant biodiversity and store vast amounts of carbon.

In total, the tropics lost 12.2 million hectares of tree cover - including forests and plantations - last year, driven largely by agriculture.

But researchers said extreme heat and drought also stoked huge fires that consumed swathes of forest across Australia, Siberia and deep into the Amazon.

These losses are a "climate emergency. They’re a biodiversity crisis, a humanitarian disaster, and a loss of economic opportunity", said Frances Seymour of the World Resources Institute, which is behind the report.

The study found some evidence that Covid-19 restrictions may have had an effect around the world - with an increase in illegal harvesting because forests were left less protected, or the return of large numbers of people to rural areas.

But researchers said there was little sign that the pandemic had changed the trajectory of forest destruction and warned that the worst could be still to come if countries slash protections in an attempt to ramp up economic growth.
But Seymour said the most "ominous signal" from the 2020 data is the instances of forests themselves falling victim to climate change.

"I mean, wetlands are burning," she said in a press briefing.

"Nature has been whispering this risk to us for a long time. But now she is shouting."

Plants - especially in the tropics - and soil comprise an enormous carbon sink, sucking up roughly a third of all the carbon pollution humans produce annually.

Yet tropical forests continue to disappear rapidly, threatening irreparable losses to Earth’s crucial biodiversity.

Researchers said the destruction of tropical primary forests in 2020 released 2.64 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2020, equal to the annual emissions of India or 570 million cars, more than double the number on the road in the United States.

"The longer we wait to stop deforestation, and get other sectors on to net zero trajectories, the more likely it is that our natural carbon sinks will go up in smoke," Seymour said.

Brazil, where far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has cut funding for environmental programs and pushed to open protected Amazon lands to agribusiness and mining, lost 1.7 million hectares of primary forest in 2020, an increase of 25 percent from 2019, the report said.

"Brazil, having achieved a huge reduction in deforestation in the Amazon, is now seeing an unravelling of that success, and it’s heartbreaking," said Seymour.

Much of the loss was in the Amazon, including new areas that were deliberately cleared.

But dry conditions also meant fires lit on previously deforested land spread to once humid forests, burning out of control.

Fires also devastated the Pantanal wetlands, a paradise of biodiversity that extend from Brazil into Bolivia - the country with the third highest level of forest loss in 2020.

Almost a third of the Pantanal was scorched, including indigenous lands and jaguar habitats, and researchers said it could be decades before the region recovers.

One bright area was in Indonesia, which reduced its rate of forest loss by 17 percent from 2019 and dropped out of the global top three for the first time in the 20 years of Global Forest Watch monitoring.

Forest destruction has slowed for four years in a row in Indonesia and researchers said government policies - helped last year by wetter weather - appeared to be having "a long-term effect on reducing primary forest loss".

Forests cover more than 30 percent of Earth’s land surface, and tropical forests are home to between 50 and 90 percent of all terrestrial species.

Recent research has shown that, beyond a certain threshold, deforestation in the Amazon basin could tip the region into a new climate regime, turning tropical forests into savannah.

In January, two top Brazilian indigenous leaders asked the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate Bolsonaro for "crimes against humanity", accusing him of unprecedented environmental damage, killings and persecution.

On March 29, a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution estimated that rising demand in wealthy countries for commodities ranging from coffee to soybeans was accelerating deforestation in the tropics.