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Turkey wants to cement dialogue for ‘two states’

From the day after Ersin Tatar’s two letters were written and sent, their content was more or less known to the Greek Cypriot side. Through the announcements and publications in the Turkish Cypriot press, there was not much left to be read when Ersin Tatar’s two letters arrived.

The issue that arises is the path followed by the two letters until they arrived from the occupied territories to the presidential Hill. Their mission through New York had a purpose which is related to the tactics that the Turkish side wants to follow.

The first letter Ersin Tatar left on the 1st of July and the second on the 8th of the month. Both had been sent to New York with the United Nations Secretary General and the leader of the Greek Cypriots, Nicos Anastasiades, as recipients. Ersin Tatar, unlike President Anastasiades who directly addressed the leader of the Turkish Cypriots, chose to involve the Secretary General of the United Nations.

Movement somewhat random and not outside the context of the actions of the Turkish side from the informal 5+1 meeting in Geneva in April 2021 until today. That meeting was characterized as informal, and that helped keep the Tatar document, which attempted to put a two-state solution on the table, from becoming an official document of the negotiations. Right after the meeting and the presentation of the known Tatar positions, the Greek Cypriot side hastened to send the message that they have not been officially put on the table in any way.

However, the matter did not end there. On the contrary, what seems to have ended there was the effort of the United Nations to bring the Cyprus issue back to the course of negotiations. Since then, the Turkish side has been in the position that if the equal sovereign status of the Turkish Cypriots is not first accepted, the resumption of negotiations cannot be discussed.

In the more than one year that has passed since the informal meeting in Geneva, the Turkish side, taking advantage of the ongoing impasse, is trying to cement a dialogue in the logic of the two states. The tactics followed from April 2021 until today seem not to have yielded what the Turkish side had hoped for. That is why he appears to be putting more pressure on the UN effort to convince UN officials that the only way to pave the way for the resumption of talks on the Cyprus issue is to recognize equal sovereign equality and equal international regime of the Turkish Cypriots.

With his two letters, now and previously in all the correspondence he had with the international organization, Ersin Tatar seeks to take advantage of every route offered to him in order to promote his position for two states on the island. The last step he found to promote the two positions came from the proposals presented to him by President Anastasiades to discuss Confidence Building Measures. Ersin Tatar appeared ready for such a dialogue but made sure to cut and sew the discussion to his own standards, that is, any discussion should take place at the level of two separate equal sovereign states.

Ersin Tatar’s counter-proposals to the confidence-building measures proposed by President Anastasiades aim to indirectly and in some cases directly promote the position of recognizing sovereign equality and the existence of two separate states on the island. Ersin Tatar’s first reaction was to reject Anastasiades’ MOUs as soon as the letter sent by the President of the Republic to the leader of the Turkish Cypriots became known. Along the way, however, he made sure to prepare his own counter-proposals, which he placed in the context of the two states.

In his letter dated July 1, Ersin Tatar (which he handed over to Assistant Secretary-General Miroslav Yecja to give to Antonio Guterres and then to be sent to Nicos Anastasiades) first states that the logic of the bizonal bicommunal federation cannot be today a basis for discussion and that only if the pseudo-state’s equal sovereign rights are recognized could they resume negotiations. He mentions that it is a fact that on the island today there are “two separate states”, one of Cyprus and the other of Cyprus, and he argues that the root of the evil is the obsession of Cyprus that Cyprus is a Greek state. “We presented our new vision in April 2021,” the Turkish leader said, referring to the six-point proposals submitted by the Turkish side at the five-party conference in Geneva.

The two letters record the Turkish Cypriot side’s proposals for confidence-building measures regarding hydrocarbons, electricity interconnection, energy, water resources, demining and immigration.

The first reaction of the government is that the President of the Republic is ready to discuss all the proposals, both those proposed by him and those submitted by Ersin Tatar, provided that the dialogue would take place on the basis of the agreed solution framework , as determined by the resolutions of the United Nations and the decisions of the Security Council. However, it is found that the proposals constitute a new attempt to establish the unacceptable narrative of a solution based on two independent states.

Anniversary message

The two Tatar letters had reached the office of President Anastasiades on the day of the anniversary of the Turkish invasion. A day before, Ersin Tatar, with his speech on the 48th anniversary of Turkey’s invasion of the island, had recorded his positions on the Cyprus issue. Referring to the Cyprus negotiations (Bairak/GTP source), Tatar reiterated the position that “a new period has begun”, after the collapse of the process that started in 1977 and lasted for a long time with some breaks. He also argued the following: “Especially the referendum on the Annan Plan and what happened in Crans Montana in 2017 showed once again that a solution on the basis of federation is not possible. The Greek Cypriot side, as always, rejecting our acquired equality and sovereign our rights and in the Crans Montana talks, he had persistently demanded ‘zero army, zero guarantees’ and a form of solution that would evolve into a single state under Greek Cypriot sovereignty. It was never possible to accept this imposition. After I assessed what happened in the negotiations processes for almost half a century to achieve a solution on the basis of the federation in the Cypriot issue, the intransigence of the Greek Cypriots-Greece and the fact that it became clear that a solution on the basis of the federation was not possible, in the period before the presidential elections of 2020, I brought on the agenda the form of a solution based on the existence of two sovereign separate states and institutional cooperation among themselves”.

The new UN resolution is adopted

The mandate for UNFICYP expires on July 31 and the Security Council is expected to renew the mandate of the peacekeeping force in Cyprus for another six months. The decision is scheduled for Thursday, July 28.

The content of the new resolution is expected to be a matter of discussion in the coming days, taking into account the fact that Nicosia was not satisfied with the content of the two reports of the United Nations Secretary General.

The Permanent Representative of Cyprus to the United Nations, Ambassador Andreas Hatzichrysanthou, appeared concerned (statements to the KYPE): “First, there is no explicit, clear reference to the basis of a solution. Second, the seriousness of the situation in Varosia and with ongoing violations of the Turkish side with the obvious aim of absorbing this area and exploiting it economically themselves.The third point we are not happy with is that there is no perspective in the report as to what happens in the future in terms of the political process, because there is no no political process”.

The “postman” is not without responsibility

The United Nations played the role of “postman” in this case but does not seem to maintain the presumption of innocence that accompanies professional postmen. While the two letters from Ersin Tatar were sent on 1 and 8 July for some reason they were delivered to the Permanent Representative of Cyprus to the United Nations this week. For some reason that only the United Nations can explain, the two letters were withheld until the UN Security Council was briefed by the UN Secretary-General’s special representative in Cyprus, Colin Stewart.

Colin Stewart’s appearance at the Security Council was on Monday and the Tatar letters to Guterres and Anastasiades were sent to the KD permanent delegation the following day. According to information (KYPE), during the presentation of the two reports, Colin Stewart said that the political process is disappointing because there is no development, nor are there any prospects on the horizon. This is due, as was said, to the electoral procedures ahead of the elections in Cyprus and Turkey in 2023.

Stewart’s reports also raise questions in relation to the other issues discussed in the Cyprus axis. According to reports from New York, the UN official spoke about the economic imbalance between free and occupied areas and recommended economic, social and cultural cooperation from both sides to resolve the problems and re-establish a climate of trust. . On the topic of immigration, Colin Stewart chose to focus on the issue of the fence erected by the authorities of the Republic of Cyprus, leaving aside the fact that immigrants reach the occupied territories through Turkey and are pushed through the buffer zone.

Source: Philenews.com

Source: Capital

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