Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated his backing for a two-state solution in Cyprus during a speech in Nicosia on Sunday evening.
“Our support for [Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar’s] vision for a two-state solution is absolute,” Erdogan said during celebrations that concluded with a military parade.
“It is time for the international community to come to terms with the facts on the ground,” Erdogan added, urging the international community to establish diplomatic and economic relations with the Northern Cyprus .
Erdogan’s renewed support for a two-state deal came just days after Tatar, Greek Cypriot leader Nikos Christodoulides, the foreign ministers of ‘guarantor’ powers Greece and Turkey, and Britain’s minister of state for Europe gathered at U.N. headquarters in New Yorkfor meetings with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to end an eight-year moratorium on formal peace negotiations.
The meeting achieved little in the way of a return to fully fledged negotiations . However , it did achieve some progress on a number of confidence-building measures such the exchange of cultural artifacts and the setting up of an advisory committee on civil society.
Guterres said he’ll meet again with Tatar and Christodoulides in September and hold another wider meeting after a Turkish Cypriot leadership election in October in which Tatar is running on a two-state platform.
Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots insist a two-state deal is the only way forward because decades of U.N.-mediated peace talks based on a U.N. Security Council endorsed framework of reunifying Cyprus as a federation no longer had any meaning.
( Source: AP)
