President Mustafa Akinci briefed representatives on the Cyprus negotiations at the Assembly which convened for an extraordinary session on Friday morning.
Before the meeting, President Akinci told reporters that the deadlock in the Mont Pèlerin talks had been overcome at the dinner hosted by UN Special Advisor Espen Barth Eide and his Deputy Elizabeth Spehar which he and the Greek Cypriot leader Anastasiades had attended.
Pointing out that an agreement had been reached to hold a five-party conference in January next year, Akinci said that this was something which the Turkish Cypriot side wanted.
“We now have a date for the five-party conference. We now know what we are going to do before that. We know that the guarantor countries will be invited to that conference. So as a result we now have a new conjuncture before us. This is what we wanted. This was something which we proposed and which we desired. It is our hope and desire that we solve this decade’s long problem hand in hand with productive to be carried out work there”, he said.
Asked to comment on missing the 2016 deadline for a settlement, the President said that this was something not to be concerned about.
“This is not important. As I said earlier what was important was for the main framework of a settlement to emerge before the end of 2016 so that we could finalise the technical details in the early months of 2017. Work on drafting the constitution, the federal laws and other technical legislation was already expected to be left to 2017. We would then give people several months to read, discuss and decide on the final solution agreement. We were talking about a referendum at the middle of 2017. We are only off our target by 9-10 days. As long as we reach a solution such a delay is fine”, he said.
Friday’s closed session was held after the first extraordinary convening of parliament had to be cancelled when President Akinci fell ill when his blood pressure spiked on 24th November.
BRT
