The Northern Cypriot foreign minister on Thursday attempted to pour cold water on renewed hopes for a breakthrough in UN-backed talks to reunify the island.
In an interview during a visit to Washington, Northern Cypriot Minister of Foreign Affairs Tahsin Ertugruloglu declared that the “ongoing negotiating process is obviously a failure” and urged a new approach.
The minister’s position flies in the face of the optimism shown by Northern Cypriot President Mustafa Akinci, who hopes to agree on a road-map for reunification before the end of the year.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has pledged his support for reaching a settlement in the coming weeks or months as one of the final acts of his mandate at the head of the world body.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, in a message issued on Thursday to mark Cyprus’ Independence Day, said: “I truly believe that a reunified Cyprus is finally within reach.”
Akinci, a social democrat, has led the negotiations and is a long-standing advocate of efforts to reunite Northern Cyprus with the south, ending a four-decade dispute, but Ertugruloglu, a member of conservative Northern Cypriot Prime Minster Huseyin Ozgurgun’s government in the unrecognized north, is much more skeptical and traveled to Washington to warn against the deal.
“I have serious doubts as to the capability of the process to produce a mutually acceptable negotiated result,” he said.
If Akinci and Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades agree on a plan to reunite the island as a federation, it would have to be put to simultaneous referendums in both entities and, judging by Ertugruloglu’s stance, there would be some political opposition in the north to any deal that failed to recognize Northern Cypriot sovereignty and close ties to Turkey.
“Do we see eye-to-eye with our president? No,” Ertugruloglu said. “Does that mean that he’s trying to secure an end for Turkish Cypriots that we don’t accept? No, I’m not saying that either.”
“He in his own political world believes that what he is doing is going to help the Turkish Cypriot people and what we’re saying is that you can keep hoping that it will, but that’s not going to get us anywhere,” he said, accusing Greek Cypriots of refusing to accept Northern Cypriots as equals.
“As long as they continue to enjoy international recognition there is no way they will have any incentive to share anything with people they don’t see as their equals,” he said. “That’s where we part our ways with the president.”
For Ertugruloglu, the entire UN-backed negotiating process was doomed to failure from the outset, since it treats Cyprus as a sovereign state and Northern Cypriots as a secessionist minority, but he admits that his government’s red lines were unlikely to ever be acceptable to the Greek side — and that they received a cool reception from UN and US officials during his visit.
The guarantee he seeks is of “sovereign equality” for the Turkish community such as it enjoyed under the 1960 constitution, which banned discrimination and said the vice president must be a Turkish Cypriot.
To guarantee this, he argued, Turkey must have the right to intervene unilaterally, as its military did in 1974, “if the Greek Cypriots are going to misbehave again.”
“Turkey will never, never allow the island of Cyprus to be a Greek island,” he said, noting what he said were his government’s warm relations with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkey invaded the northern part of the Mediterranean island following an Athens-inspired coup by Greek Cypriots seeking union with Greece.
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