Press reports said that the Turkish President opposed the prospect for a settlement based on a bi communal, bi zonal federation, while addressing a joint news conference in the Turkish-occupied north of Nicosia with Turkish-Cypriot leader Dervis Eroglu.
The same reports in the Greek press note that Erdogan denied receiving a letter from Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades, which was delivered to him at his inauguration ceremony in Ankara last week by Greek Foreign Minister Evangelos Venizelos.
Apparently when Erdogan arrived in the occupied north of the island, he was quoted as saying that Ankara would “not allow Turkish Cypriots to be incorporated within the Greek-Cypriot state as a minority” and then he called on Greece and the United Kingdom to intensify efforts to break the deadlock, claiming that “the Cyprus problem will be solved very quickly if Greece does its duty as a guarantor power as Turkey has done.”
Erdogan also pointed out that his country would permit the reopening of a former Greek Orthodox seminary near Constantinopole if the government of Athens finally allowed the construction of traditional mosques with minarets in the capital to begin as well as gave its consent to the Muslim communities in Thrace, northern Greece, to directly appoint their own muftis.
His statements were slammed by the Greek government and in a strongly worded statement the spokesman of the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Constantinos Koutras, accused the Turkish President of attempting to “equate certain of Greece’s international obligations with Turkey’s heavy burden of responsibility regarding the Cyprus issue”, and described the parallel as “historically and legally groundless and, thus, politically unacceptable.”
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