Tatar thanks UN for ‘fair manner’
PRESIDENT Ersin Tatar has written to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres thanking him for the “fair and balanced manner” in which he moderated April’s “five-plus UN” informal Cyprus meeting in Geneva.
Mr Tatar also asked the UN Security Council to approach his six-point plan to achieve a two-state solution “with an open mind” and by taking into consideration decades of failed negotiations.
In the letter, President Tatar addressed “the distortion, by the Greek Cypriot side, that the Turkish Cypriots ‘left the government’ of their own will in the 1963-64 period”.
“Turkish Cypriot civil servants never disclaimed the ‘Government of Cyprus’,” he said. “[However], due to the prevailing conditions since [December 1963] they were unable, for physical and security reasons” to sustain their roles within the government, a report by U Thant in 1964 stated, Mr Tatar wrote.
Turkish Cypriots “did attempt, through the UN, to return to the House of Representatives but . . . the then Speaker of the House, the late Glafcos Clerides, told the Turkish Cypriot Representatives that they could only return if they accepted the unilateral changes that were made to the [Republic of Cyprus] Constitution – particularly the unchangeable provisions providing for bicommunal power sharing”.
In the face of these changes, Turkish Cypriots “applied to the UN to help in the restoration of the 1960 constitutional order but . . . the UN did not think this was part of its mandate” since “a return to normal conditions” and a “return to the constitutional order” did not mean the same thing, according to Mr Tatar.
The “unlawful changes” made to the Constitution of the Republic of Cyprus that was “hijacked by the Greek Cypriots in December 1963” caused the former bicommunal Government of Cyprus to lose its “legitimacy”.
Combined with the subjugation and domination of Turkish Cypriots, “the Turkish Cypriots had no alternative but to establish their own separate administration in Cyprus in exercise of their inherent right to self-determination”.
Mr Tatar added that the “integration of the Turkish Cypriot community” into “the usurped ‘Republic of Cyprus’”, as called for by Greek Cypriot leader Nicos Anastasiades, “amounts to asking the Turkish Cypriot side to legitimise the Greek Cypriot hijacking of the 1960 bicommunal Republic of Cyprus and agreeing to integrate themselves into this illegality through, what the other side calls, ‘osmosis’”.
THE US supports a “Cypriot-led, comprehensive settlement to reunify the island as a bizonal, bicommunal federation to benefit all Cypriots” American Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted on Monday after speaking with Greek Cypriot Foreign Minister Nikos Christodoulides “about our strong bilateral relationship and our commitment to stability and prosperity in the region”.