The head of the north’s citrus export company Cypfruvex, which is accused of having trafficked hundreds of Bangladeshi nationals and left them to live in squalid conditions in camps near Morphou without any work or wages denied having been removed from his job on Wednesday.
Cemal Redif has been Cypfruvex’s general manager since 2009, but reports surfaced on Wednesday morning that he had been relieved of his duties after the conditions of the camps in which the workers were living were revealed.
However, he denied those reports later on Wednesday, saying, “I am currently on leave. Nobody has informed me that I have been sacked.”
“I am continuing to work wholeheartedly for the country’s orange producers. I went on holiday for the first time in years. I am carrying out my duty wholeheartedly. I came to this job with my head held high, and if I were to leave it, I would leave with my head held high,” he said.
Redif had reportedly been summoned by the Turkish Cypriot police to the Morphou police station to give a statement regarding the workers’ plight and the more than 100 complaints filed by people saying they had been trafficked into Cyprus.
Newspaper Ozgur Gazete reported that many of the people who were living in the camps around Morphou had been brought to Cyprus between March and June, despite the citrus harvesting season having been over by the time they arrived.
As a result, they were left without work and thus without income, living in squalid conditions in shacks near Morphou.
Wednesday’s reports are not the first time it has seemed as though Redif has been close to losing his job, with it having been reported in 2019 that four Cypfruvex board members were preparing to resign over a “breakdown in communication” between Redif and the other board members.
Newspaper Yeni Duzen reported at the time that the board had resolved to remove Redif, and that this decision was vetoed by then-‘prime minister’ Ersin Tatar and then-‘health minister’ Ali Pilli.
He had briefly taken up the role of Tatar’s chief of staff when he became ‘prime minister’ in May 2019, but resigned in the September of the same year, with Yeni Duzen reporting he had “struggled to adapt”.
The story regarding the workers’ living conditions had broken in the last week of August, with journalist Pinar Barut saying of the workers’ living conditions that “the scene we encountered in Morphou horrified us. The workers we spoke to said they have been living in these conditions for months.”
“They are all trying to survive in a slave camp, filthy, unemployed, penniless, with no water, electricity, hygiene, toilets, or bathrooms. No one has visited them for months,” she added.
One of the workers told Ozgur Gazete, “I came two months and 10 days ago, and I only worked for a month. We buy rice and chicken with our own money and eat here.”
Another said the consultants were two men who identified themselves as “Mustafa” and “Cihangir”. He said he had paid the pair €8,000 for the opportunity to come to Cyprus to work, and that in total the pair may have made as much as €13 million by importing workers from Bangladesh.
He said he had been paid 24,000TL (€632) for his first month’s work, before being paid just 7,000TL (€184) for his second month, and not being paid since. The north’s minimum wage was at the time 33,926TL (€893) per month, and has since risen to 40,436TL (€1,060).
On Tuesday, humanitarian aid packages were delivered to migrant workers living on 10 different sites near Morphou.
The north’s Refugee Rights Association (MHD) described the aid recipients as “victims of human trafficking”.
The packages included drinking water, food, and personal hygiene products, and were provided through various projects which had been financed by the European Union.
The MHD described the finding of the camps by journalists in August as a “human trafficking scandal” and added that it had a “great impact on society” and has “revealed the ongoing human tragedy in the north of Cyprus”.
“Reports prepared by lawyers and observers from the Human Rights Platform [IHP] determined that these workers were working under conditions which were not in accordance with their basic human rights, and that they were being housed in inappropriate conditions,” they said.
They also said a “needs analysis” study had been carried out, which found that the people living on the sites required “urgent humanitarian aid and legal support”.
“These inhumane conditions go against international human rights treaties and the European Union,” they said, adding that they will continue their work against what they described as “fundamental human rights violations”.
