Nicos Anastasiades is the one who whetted Turkey’s appetite for a two state solution

Statements by former General Secretary of AKEL and AKEL MP Andros Kyprianou:

13 July 2024, ‘Astra’ radio station

At the crucial time, those who knew what was going on did not speak out and only AKEL was left to say that Nicos Anastasiades was discussing a two state solution, Andros Kyprianou told ‘Astra’ radio station.

The former General Secretary of AKEL stressed that it was Nicos Anastasiades who whetted Turkey’s appetite for a two state solution and it is sad that after so many years he is telling so many lies and wondered where he derives this audacity from.

Andros Kyprianou said that in a meeting he had at the home of Turkey’s then Foreign Minister in November 2018, Mevlut Cavusoglu told him that at some point at Crans Montana he asked Nicos Anastasiades to meet and there he mentioned to him that the Greek Cypriots would never accept the rotating presidency and asked him to let him go back to Cyprus, win the presidential elections again and then he would promote the a state solution.

A.Kyprianou also said that Nicos Anastasiades told Andreas Mavroyiannis, who was the Greek Cypriot side’s chief negotiator at the time, to carry out a study on two separate Exclusive Economic Zone’s and when Mavroyiannis objected since that would mean that we are talking about a two states solution, Nicos Anastasiades replied that it was not his job to judge.

A.Kyprianou also referred to another incident when Cavusoglu asked the Turkish Cypriot leader Akinci at the time what he would do if Anastasiades proposed a two state solution.

Akinci immediately addressed Nicos Anastasiades and invited him to proceed to an interim strategic agreement on the basis of the Guterres Framework.

However, Anastasiades’ response was whether Akinci had got Turkey’s permission for this and then asked him which framework he was talking about, when the UN Secretary General himself was stating that there was only one framework and it was the one with the 6 points.

As for today, Andros Kyprianou assessed that valuable time was lost and that the way President Christodoulides is handling the Cyprus problem is not helpful.