Statements of the General Secretary of the C.C of AKEL Stefanos Stefanou after the session of the National Council

 

• The aim should be to break the deadlock on the Cyprus problem–
• AKEL resubmitted its proposal on the energy issue

30 March 2023, AKEL C.C. Press Office, Nicosia

We raised various issues so we could understand what the content of the President of the Republic’s thoughts is, on how he and his government will move in relation to the resumption of the negotiations.

The situation surrounding the Cyprus problem is really hopeless. We have the longest period of deadlock and absence of any negotiation procedure that has ever existed on the Cyprus problem, with the international community considering the Greek Cypriot side to be jointly responsible for the impasse, at the same time as Turkey is exploiting the situation to create new occupational fait accompli.

It is, for that reason, imperative that specific and targeted initiatives should be undertaken to break the deadlock and resume the negotiations from the point where they were interrupted at Crans Montana, preserving the convergences recorded so far and negotiating on the Guterres Framework.

I asked the President of the Republic if this is what he means by the resumption of negotiations and he gave a positive response. So if this is indeed the position of the President and the government, we welcome it, because this is our view, this was also the position for some years of the Secretary General of the United Nations himself and of the Security Council on the resumption of the negotiations.

Secondly, we agree that to create the momentum for Turkey and the Turkish side in general to return to the negotiating table, we should identify those areas that can generate common interests and incentives for Turkey to return to the negotiating table. The approach of the President is that this arena is Euro-Turkish relations. We continue to believe that the arena that can really liberate incentives is the question of energy. This is an area whose role and importance has been upgraded due to the energy crisis too and the situation created due to the war in Ukraine.

With this in mind and on the occasion of the session of the National Council, I have once again submitted AKEL’s proposal, which we had tabled three years ago to the previous President, with the goal of discussing why we really believe that there can be possibilities to create momentum for the resumption of the negotiations.

When asked if he requested clarifications from the President of the Republic regarding the establishment of the Supreme Council for Intergovernmental Cooperation with Greece, the General Secretary of AKEL replied:

AKEL did not react to the creation of this institution. We reacted to the statement of the President of the Republic for joint sessions at regular intervals of the Ministerial Councils of Cyprus and Greece, in the presence of the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister of Greece.

We consider that what applies is what the Government spokesman said the day after that this isn’t what has been agreed, but that what has been agreed is that depending on the issue there should be consultations between the competent Ministers. This existed before and is natural because Greece is our main pillar of support. There should be close cooperation and coordination on matters of common interest.

From there onwards, the role and presence of the Republic of Cyprus, as an independent and bi-communal state must be distinct so as not to give Turkey any occasion or tool to misinterpret our positions and project its position, as it has formulated it since 1964, that there is supposedly no Republic of Cyprus and what is called the Republic of Cyprus is being abused by the Greeks, which is not correct.

Replying to a question regarding AKEL’s proposal on the energy issue, the General Secretary of AKEL stated:

SS: The President said that we will discuss it, in fact we agreed that the mechanism of the National Council will forward AKEL’s proposal to the other members of the National Council too, because we want it to be discussed. It is something that we had requested from the previous President and which unfortunately did not materialize. However, we look ahead and not backwards and believe that a serious discussion should take place here because the goal is to find ways to break the deadlock and resume the negotiations.