Cyprus Mail 5 December 2024 - by Marko Ljubicic
The United States navy’s guided missile destroyer the USS The Sullivans arrived in Larnaca on Thursday, the country’s ambassador in Nicosia Julie Davis Fisher said.
She said the ship has stopped in Larnaca as part of its deployment to the eastern Mediterranean, and that her country is “grateful for our service members away from home during the holiday season”.
She also offered a small history of the ship’s name, saying it was named in honour of the five Sullivan brothers, George, Francis, Joseph, Madison and Albert, who were all killed in action when their ship was sunk in the Pacific Ocean during the second world war.
The loss of all five brothers constituted the greatest military loss by any single family during the war.
The ship’s arrival is one of a growing number of US navy ships docking in Cyprus, with the USS Oak Hill having made multiple stops on the island earlier in the year, most recently at the end of October.
The ship had previously arrived in Cyprus to conduct scheduled maintenance, with commanding officer Jason Nowell saying at the time that the marines would conduct “routine bilateral training exercises” with Cyprus’ National Guard both in Paphos and Larnaca.
The Defence Visual Information Distribution Service said these exercises are “part of [the marines’] scheduled deployment”.
The USS Oak Hill had in August taken part in joint exercises with the USS Wasp and the Turkish navy’s amphibious assault ship the TCG Anadolu, and fellow Turkish navy ship the TCG Gokova.
The USS Wasp’s presence in Cyprus had also generated controversy on the island, with Akel accusing the Cypriot government of dragging Cyprus into the middle of extremely heightened tensions by consenting to the “continuing concentration of foreign military forces on our island”.
Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar said that “south Cyprus has become a military stopover point for countries which show at every opportunity they are party to the crisis and that they are complicit in the crimes against humanity being committed, and it has even started to use its civilian ports for military purposes.”
Meanwhile, Turkey’s defence ministry issued a warning to the Republic of Cyprus over military activities on the island.
“The recent increase in activity on the island of Cyprus and the Greek Cypriot Administration’s ongoing activities are being meticulously monitored,” they said,
Despite this, Cyprus’ Defence Minister Vasilis Palmas was resolute in his defence of the ship’s docking in Cyprus, speaking of his “sadness” at “some publications and also some political parties” which criticised the government’s handling of the situation.
“There is nothing reprehensible, there is no fault, we are a recognised, democratic, modern state inside the international community, and we have every right, the inalienable right, to perform exercises for the purpose of being ready if and when issues arise,” he said.
