In an interview, Prime Minister Ersin Tatar said that he respects President Mustafa Akinci, but they have different views on the Cyprus problem. He argued that the situation had changed since in the four years since Akinci had been elected.
Tatar said that Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu had attended the Cyprus Conference in Crans-Montana [2017] for eleven days and had become angry because he saw how “insincere” the other side was and what President Anastasiades had done in order to avoid finding a solution to the Cyprus problem. He also said the following:
“Their aim is to take the whole of Cyprus into the EU. Their understanding of the word ‘federation’ is different. In their view, it is a structure in which the majority governs the minority, continues until osmosis and at the end of the day it is a unitary state. Turkey does not exist in this model. Neither do its guarantees nor its army. In this environment, we will be annihilated.
“This federation is not possible from now on. For this reason, both we and Mr Kudret [Foreign Minister Ozersay] said that ‘it has been exhausted’. And Turkey says, in a diplomatic sense, let federation stay at the table, but let other options also exist. What we understand of the two separate states within the EU is the current situation. Two separate states exist in this country. […]”
Kibris
