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2 December 2003

We want to enhance intercommunal cooperation based on mutual respect and equality. There are a great number of longstanding humanitarian problems waiting to be taken up in good will. Settling the property questions and all losses arising from the attempt to convert the partnership state into a Greek Cypriot state and such like will help to redress ongoing grievances and this will be in the interest of Cyprus as a whole.  

We have the will to face the current realities. Denouncing our legitimacy has brought no solution and will bring no solution. We should leave aside such denunciations and seek ways of working with each other as absolute political equals with a view to solving common problems.

I waited for eleven years for Mr. Kyprianou to agree to a federal solution in line with the 1975, 1977 and 79 agreements. He never believed in a federal settlement. His ambition was to stick to the title of “the government of Cyprus” and continue the policy of converting Cyprus into a Greek Cypriot Republic. According to Archbishop Makarios, keeping the title of the partnership state was the nearest thing to Enosis. Mr. Vasiliou wowed to follow this national line and was concerned with establishing a unitary state which would sail under the name of federalism. Mr. Clerides, who challenged Vasiliou to settle the problem on the basis of the UN “Set of Ideas” if he dared, took over from Mr. Vasiliou. He refused to talk to me for two years saying that there was nothing in common to talk about. When the UN Secretary-General finally brought him to the table, he wanted me to accept “Cyprus Government’s” application for EU membership in order to talk to me. He knew that from a legal and political point of view this was not possible.

Talks helped the Greek Cypriot side to project “the Cyprus problem” as a problem of occupation which took place in 1974 and which should be resolved through the return of refugees to their old habitats. He assured the world that “the Government of Cyprus” would treat the Turkish Cypriot “minority” very generously and all would be well if only the minority stopped seeking partnership status (involving sovereignty). “We attend these talks for tactical reasons” he said to a Greek Cypriot journalist following ours talks in Glion, (Switzerland) in 1997, “our tactic being to show the Turkish Cypriot side as intransigent. We have been very successful so far, so why should we change tactics” he declared.

Our goodwill in continuing the talks while the playing field was so “unlevel” has worked against us to the point that a world recognising the Greek Cypriot side as the legitimate government of Cyprus has shut its eyes to the legal and political rights and status of Turkish Cypriots as embodied in the 1960 International Agreements. “Cyprus problem is not a legal problem, it is a political problem” we are told by honourable representatives of the EU and representatives of the super power who champions the rule of law and democracy world-wide. We have now reached the stage where even self-defence is being branded as intransigence!

The Greek Cypriot side is so sure of victory under the existing circumstances that the former Greek Cypriot leader Glafcos Clerides, in a recent statement reported in the Greek Cypriot daily Mahi on 30 November 2003, even confirmed his Glion statement regarding the established tactics used and the real intentions they pursued in negotiations. About the recent face-to-face talks Glafcos Clerides is reported to have said;

“It was necessary for us to pursue an attitude in the talks that would, without accepting anything, without making any concessions, show that the responsibility for the failure is on the shoulders of the Turkish Cypriots. In order for the Helen side to have this excuse, we had to show that the reason for the lack of progress in the talks was the intransigence of the Turks. Naturally to do this you needed to have contacts to inform the EU members fully so that the UN Secretary-General would say the same thing. Because I can say that they used to pay much more attention to what De Soto has to say”.

It is for the UN in particular and the international community in general to evaluate the possibility of success in talks where one of the equal parties take part just for tactical reasons in order to keep and maintain its unjustly acquired advantageous position and to show the other side as intransigent.

Naturally, all these do not deprive us from our sense of direction that is to reach a negotiated settlement to the Cyprus issue which would be based on the sovereign equality of the two ex constituent partners of the 1960 partnership Republic of Cyprus, which would respect the agreed principle of territorial separation (bi-zonality) and which would be guaranteed by the 1960 Treaties of Guarantee and Alliance.

We will not deviate from this course which we believe is the only course that can yield a sustainable settlement to the deep-rooted identity related conflict of Cyprus -  a conflict in which the equal Greek Cypriot partner has been trying since 1963 to deprive the equal Turkish Cypriot partner of its vitality and equal status and attempting to speak on behalf of the whole island.