UN peace plan is recipe for bloodshed in Cyprus

A UN plan to reunite the Turkish and Greek communities of Cyprus ahead of the island’s accession to the European Union in 2004 is a recipe for ethnic violence, Anatolia news agency quoted Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash as saying here Monday.
Denktash’s outburst came just days before parliamentary elections in his breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), which is widely seen as a referendum on the UN reunification plan and the island’s joint accession to the EU.

The anti-Denktash opposition, which says it is ready to negotiate the plan drawn by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, is expected to make major political gains in Sunday’s polls.

Denktash, whom the UN has blamed for the failure of the peace plan in March, told a conference at a university in Istanbul that the Annan plan was eroding the rights of the Turkish Cypriots.