The main opposition Republican Turkish Party (CTP) has expressed support to ongoing efforts by the United Nations Secretary-General’s Personal Envoy Maria Angela Holguin to establish a common ground for the resumption of official talks.
It said that it was ready to assist the UN envoy in any way possible.
The announcement came following Holguin’s visit to the CTP where she met with the leader of the main opposition Republican Turkish Party Tufan Erhüman and his team.
Also present at Wednesday’s meeting was the CTP’s General Secretary Asım Akansoy, and party MPs Sıla Usar İncirli, Fikri Toros, and Armağan Candan.
In a written statement, Erhüman said that a productive exchange of ideas and views had taken place during the meeting with the aim of overcoming the current deadlock on the Cyprus Problem.
The CTP leader said that Holguin’s meetings with different segments from both sides were “valuable” and that the Turkish Cypriot community is ready for a sustainable, secure, permanent, and comprehensive solution based on political equality.
Erhürman also said that the demands of President Ersin Tatar for “sovereign equality” and “equal international status” still remained incomprehensibly vague.
He said that the only realistic solution model in Cyprus, as stated in all relevant UN Security Council resolutions, was a bicommunal, bizonal federation based on political equality.
Erhürman, stating that the way to share sovereignty equally in such a federation is for two equal founding states to exercise their own powers and for powers in the federal state to be exercised on the basis of political equality, argued that to achieve the goal, all the convergences reached as of Crans-Montana should be adhered to.
Erhürman, once again, emphasized that “Our goal as the CTP is not to start negotiations, but to ensure that a negotiation process that will lead us to a solution is correctly structured from the beginning and reaches a conclusion.
The CTP leader said that a short-lived negotiation process that will end in disappointment or which would drag on for years was not something that the Turkish Cypriots desired.