President was joking over name, says spokesman

By Jean Christou

President Nicos Anastasides was only joking when he referred to a post-solution Cyprus as the ‘United State of Cyprus’ the government said on Wednesday.

Anastasiades was quoted in Turkish Daily Sabah as saying: “It has been said that the name we are discussing with [Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa] Akinci is the United Federation of Cyprus. That is not true. The name I am hoping for from my heart is the United States of Cyprus.”

But government spokesman Nicos Christodoulides said Anastasiades had told the journalist who asked, that it was too early to discuss it and “jokingly, said it might be called ‘United States of Cyprus’, suggesting that with the United States of America there would be two superpowers.

Later on Wednesday, deputy spokesman Victoras Papadopoulos said the conversation with the Turkish journalist had been “clearly banter”.

“I can tell you with certainty, because I was present at the interview,” he said. The interview was recorded, he added. The audio was also released by the palace in which Anastasides can be heard laughing when he made the comment. He also made no reference to what his heart wanted.

When asked through an interpreter by the Turkish journalist: “What is the name of the new state to be established?” the president said: “We have not even discussed it but thank you for asking, because I heard my friend Akinci saying that it would be the ‘United Cyprus Federation’… and I joked between us… saying ‘why not be the  United States of  Cyprus’… but we have not yet discussed it… and I said it would be symbolic that we could say we are the second superpower. But I wish to find a solution on the core issues and the name is the last thing that should be an obstacle to the solution.”

Meanwhile, following the backlash over the misquote, the Green Party said it had decided to set up a platform of Greek and Turkish Cypriots to press the two leaders to keep the name and flag of the ‘Republic of Cyprus’. The party said it was already mustering support in the north and the south of the island and a petition would be handed to both leaders.

“I believe that there will be massive support for this,” said Greens leader Giorgos Perdikis, harking back to the failed Annan plan in 2004 and using the same terminology to describe the “virgin birth of a new state out of nowhere”.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.