Having been invited to appear before Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on Tuesday 24 January, the President of the Republic of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, said that he had every confidence in the development of the negotiations on the reunification of the island.
These negotiations resumed in Geneva in early January between the parties - the Republic of Cyprus in the south, a member of the European Union, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and the guarantor countries (the United Kingdom, Greece and Turkey were appointed to carry out this role in the Treaty of Independence of the island in 1960) - with no favourable outcome. Anastasiades said that there was great disappointment internationally, but that the expectations should have been more modest, as this was only the start of the process.
The Cypriot President said that the fact that there had been a conference at which everybody – including Turkey – sat around the table is, in itself, a success. Eventually, he feels that a result will be achieved, he added, highlighting elements of agreement already reached in the fields of governance (bi-zonal and bi-community federation with equality between the two sides: Ed), power-sharing and the economy, but not sidestepping the major problems that persist in terms of defining the respective territories and security guarantees.
Anastasiades believes that many problems stem from the fact that the guarantors feel they have the right to intervene, as Turkey did in the coup d'état 1974. Instead of re-establishing the constitutional order, he went on to explain, it then invaded 37% of the territory. He added that the evolutions in the status of guarantor prove that they are obsolete provisions in no way able to respond to the concerns of the Cypriot people. He spoke out against the refusal to withdraw Turkish troops from the island (currently 300,000 soldiers) announced on 13 January by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. If they remain, this will represent a permanent threat, supervision or the influence of a guarantor in favour of one community and at the expense of the other as well as an infringement of the principle of sovereignty lay down in the United Nations Charter, Anastasiades stressed.
Negotiations resumed at technical level in Geneva on 17 January between ministers and senior officials of both sides and of the guarantor nations. President Anastasiades has announced that he is to meet his opposite number from the Republic of Northern Cyprus, Mustafa Akıncı, on Thursday. The determination on both sides will be vital, said Anastasiades, who went on to say that the United Nations Security Council would be the only acceptable interlocutor at the end of these negotiations as a guarantor for a solution.
Pedro Agramunt, president of PACE, is calling fervently for such a solution, saying this would send out a strong signal to the European Union at an important time in its history, that would be even more significant if it happened under the Cypriot Presidency of the CoE. This Presidency, which began in November of last year, will run until 19 May. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)