The National Unity Party (UBP)/Democratic Party (DP) coalition government led by Prime Minister Huseyin Ozgurgun and Deputy PM Serdar Denktaş held a press conference yesterday to evaluate its four months in power.
Ozgurgun held the press conference with his chief ministers present, something which was unusual, Havadis reports.
Both Ozgurgun and Denktaş said that they have differing opinions with the President, on the Cyprus problem. Denktaş noted that this is the reason why they want a government representative on the Turkish Cypriot negotiating team.
On the same topic, Halkin Sesi reports that Ozgurgun complained that he is not briefed by Akinci right after every meeting in the Cyprus negotiations and added that during former Turkish Cypriot President Mehmet Ali Talat’s time in office, they had been briefed directly after every meeting.
The paper reports that Denktaş said that the government has a different interpretation to Akinci and the Greek Cypriot side on the 11 February (2014) joint declaration. The report added that they want to have a representative in the negotiations to observe things “as they are and not as they are conveyed” to them.
Foreign Minister Tahsin Ertugruloglu alleged that “we do not need to deceive our people that a solution will be reached” and claimed that the joint declaration “should not be evaluated as the Koran of the [negotiating] process”.
Referring to progress made by the new coalition government, PM Ozgurgun said that it was too early to make an assessment one way or the other since the government had only been in power for a few months.
Commenting on the establishment by Turkey of a youth and sports coordination office in the North, Ozgurgun said that he does not want to analyse what is behind the reactions against this proposed office. He said that he had met with all the sport clubs in the TRNC and with 800 athletes, without seeing any reaction against the office.
He argued that he does not know how much the young people who react against the office are related with sports and that he cannot understand why they show such opposition.
Havadis, Halkin Sesi
