NEGOTIATIONS?

If there are air attacks, these people would be armed. They would attack the Greek Cypriots and conflict would break out.’ Is any progress possible faced with logic like this? Hardly. The Greek Cypriot administration rejected all the Turkish side’s proposals without even discussing them and now it’s carrying out so-called negotiations by throwing out concerns at random. This is how the negotiations on Cyprus are going. Even if these talks haven’t been successful, they’ve showed that the Greek Cypriot administration doesn’t want to reach a solution. So we should agree that it’s wrong to constantly pressure Denktas. It was clear from the beginning that no real negotiations would take place due to the terms accepted in New York. A key mechanism, one accepted with the Turkish side’s suggestions, would be bringing UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s plan to referendum automatically. Adding to this the guarantee of Greek Cypriots joining the EU on May 1, the Turkish side had no chance left of real negotiations. Today’s Cyprus talks proved this.

It’s far from clear that the post-March 22 talks including Turkey and Greece will be any different. Unless there’s serious pressure on the Greek Cypriot administration, it would be very difficult to make them accept the Turkish side’s sine qua nons. Ankara expects that the US will make a few changes in favor of the Turkish side during the four-way talks or when Annan is filling in the blanks. These are the negotiations which Ankara accepts. Actually Turkey accepted stipulation of Annan’s plan and is expecting corrections to it during the talks’ final stage with US help, as it wants to receive a date for EU membership negotiations this December. It’s because of this that the road map dictated by Annan was approved.”