Parliament Speaker visits women at assembly
PARLIAMENT Speaker Önder Sennaroğlu visited women who work at the assembly to celebrate March 8 International Women’s Day, also known as International Working Women’s Day.
He presented the female staff with flowers and wished them success in their work, while accompanied by Parliament secretary general Seral Fırat.
Mr Sennaroğlu said that there is a high number of women working in Parliament and that women are also “strongly represented” in the upper tiers of management and that this should be the case in other institutions.
Although there has been development towards women’s rights, equal representation, and the elimination of violence against women, the desired level has not been reached yet, Mr Sennaroğlu said.
He described new data showing that women’s employment rates in the TRNC did not reflect the female population as “saddening”.
Elsewhere Public Works and Transport
Minister Resmiye Canaltay, the only woman in the Council of Ministers, visited female personnel in her department.
She gave them gifts of mimosa flowers, described as “brittle yet a symbol of persistence and power”.
Mrs Canaltay made a speech during the celebrations, in which she underlined that women must be present in all areas of life equally, according to a statement from the ministry.
“The struggle that has been given for many years for women to have a place in every area of life as individuals is not over yet and unfortunately it will continue to be present,” Mrs Canaltay said. “Even though women and men are equal before law, we are not equal in representation. Societies where women are not strong cannot go forward.”
THE “crisis” in the eastern Mediterranean will continue unless the Cyprus problem is solved based on agreements made in the 1970s, the UK’s former envoy for the island has said.
Lord Hannay, who served as the British government’s special representative for Cyprus from 1996 to 2003, said that President Ersin Tatar’s call for a two-state solution is “not a new idea at all” and has little prospect of being accepted by the Greek Cypriots and the international community.
There is “no alternative” to a plan adopted by the late TRNC President Rauf Denktaş and the late Greek Cypriot leader Spyros Kyprianou in 1979, the former diplomat said, when the two men agreed to uphold a 1977 deal between Mr Denktaş and Archbishop Makarios to form a “bicommunal Federal Republic”.
Lord Hannay made the comments during a “webinar” on “Geopolitics and Energy Security in the Eastern Mediterranean” organised by the London-based think tank the Circle Foundation.
Asked for his thoughts on a “way out” of the eastern Mediterranean “crisis” involving countries such as Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon and Israel, Lord Hannay said that the failure to find a solution to the Cyprus problem “lay at the heart of the cat’s cradle of intersecting and often conflicting interests”.
“No way will be found out of the crisis that we’re discussing . . . without a solution to the Cyprus problem,” he said.
“Put simply that is a sine qua non and that certainly was the view of the Greek and Turkish foreign ministers with whom I worked most closely – George Papandreou, İsmail Cem and Abdullah Gül.
“As I worked my way around, again and again, that circuit of Athens, Ankara, the two sides of Nicosia, Brussels and New York, I was of course always on the lookout for some new element that might ease the deadlock over the four-sided Rubik’s cube of which the Cyprus problem was composed: territory, governance, property and security.
“Unlike Alexander the Great, I didn’t have a sword to cut the Gordian knot and nor did anyone else, as was demonstrated in 1974.”
There were times when a “new element” to the Cyprus issue appeared “but as often as not it was one which made the Cyprus problem more difficult to solve not easier” Lord Hannay recalled, highlighting the Greek Cypriots’ purchase of Russian S-300 missiles in the late 1990s and the “distraction” of the 2003 war in Iraq.
Another new element was the discovery of “substantial deposits of natural gas” to the south of the island in 2011, which Lord Hannay said he initially believed could be a positive development.
“Why? Well for one thing it met a concern of the Greek Cypriots, who of course were more prosperous than their Turkish Cypriot neighbours, that they would end up paying the lion’s share of any costs arising from a settlement of the Cyprus problem and that would have been hugely helped, of course, by these gas deposits.
“And then the economics . . . of developing the gas deposits pointed so clearly towards a shared approach between the two sides of the island, given that a pipeline to join up with Turkey’s already existing links to the rest of Europe would clearly have left a much larger share of the profits from the gas to the peoples of Cyprus than would be the case if it had to be exported through a pipeline, such as the one contemplated from
Cyprus to Italy, or alternatively, a liquefied natural gas solution.
“But, as invariably seemed to be the case with anything related to Cyprus, the politics trumped the economics and what should have been a new element bringing the two sides closer together became, in reality, a new bone of contention.”
Referring to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s efforts to establish if conditions exist for a new round of formal Cyprus talks, Lord Hannay continued: “Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots are suggesting abandoning the 40-year agreed approach based on a bizonal bicommunal federation and looking instead to a confederal arrangement based on two independent sovereign states.
“Now in truth this is not a new idea at all. It was always the preferred solution of the late Rauf Denktaş, with whom I discussed the matter endlessly and fruitlessly, and it was the present Foreign Minister of the TRNC [Tahsin Ertuğruloğlu] who came to the European Council meeting in Copenhagen in December 2002 and destroyed the last hope of getting the Annan plan through before Cyprus joined the EU still divided.
“Is there any reason to believe that this approach, supported by the recently elected President of the TRNC and his Foreign Minister, has any more chance of success now, except of course as a spoiler, which it was then?
“I really can’t see any sign of that being so. Are the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, who have voted innumerable resolutions supporting a bizonal or bicommunal federation, about to stand on their heads? I don’t think so.
“Is there any sign of Greece and the Greek Cypriots moving in that direction? I really doubt if there’s any chance of that.
“Now, if I’m right in my judgement, then there is, in the long-run, no alternative to resuming the search for a solution on the basis already agreed between Denktaş and Kyprianou back in the 1970s.
“No alternative that might provide a way out of the geopolitical [crisis] in the eastern Mediterranean.
“Without that [a solution to the Cyprus problem] alas I have to say that the crisis will continue and it could possibly worsen.”
Both sides of Cyprus are “terrified” that “confidence-building measures will concede some crucial aspect of the final settlement of the Cyprus problem, which they only want to concede in return for an overall solution that satisfies them,” Lord Hanny added.