PRESIDENT Tassos Papadopoulos said yesterday the passage of time was not helping towards solving the Cyprus problem, but added that accepting the Annan plan would have been worse.
Papadopoulos was speaking before his departure for Brussels to participate in a meeting between EU heads of state and government and US President George Bush.
“There is no-one, no community, no politician, no civilian apart from us, the Greek Cypriots, who wants a solution sooner than we do,” he said.
“Of course as time passes some situations are made permanent that will make finding a solution and reunification even more difficult. We are ready at any time we are summoned for a dialogue, under the auspices of the UN, to find a solution that will lead to the reunification of our country and a viable and functional settlement.”
However, he said that although it “sounded good” when others spoke of a new dialogue to solve the Cyprus issue: “We have bitter experiences from such dialogues, which in actual fact have become a process to impose unacceptable solutions on our side.”
Asked to comment on statements by Turkish Cypriot ‘Prime Minister’ Mehmet Ali Talat on Monday that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdgoan has no intention of meeting Papadopoulos, the President said he did not know if Talat was speaking on behalf of Erdogan, but that there was probably such an understanding between them.
He also said that Turkish Cypriot efforts to connect an EU financial regulation with one governing direct trade with the north proved that the attempts aimed at securing “purely political gains” rather than the lifting the “so-called isolation of the Turkish Cypriots” or the securing of financial benefits.
Papadopoulos said that recent arrangements agreed between Cyprus and the EU on Green Line trade offered the Turkish Cypriots the opportunity to export their goods “without our intervention, without depending on anything and without any restriction, apart from those imposed by the EU.
“We believe the EU, to a great extent, supports our view that the financial regulation should not be linked to the regulation on direct trade,” he said.
“This connection proves that it is neither the lifting of the so-called isolation of the Turkish Cypriots nor financial gains that are pursued but purely political gains. If one looks at the statistics and the figures, one can easily realise that this is the case.”
