According to the Cyprus Mail, Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat agreed yesterday that negotiations on the Cyprus problem cannot be completed by the end of the year.
Speaking at a joint news conference at the end of his visit to Ankara, Talat referred to the need to set timeframes, as well as involve the UN in his direct talks with President Demetris Christofias. He also spoke of “alternative solutions” if a deal could not be found.
“This procedure can’t last forever. There needs to be a timeframe and we need to know when the procedure will end,” said Gul. He said his assessment was that “the negotiating procedure can’t be completed by the end of the current year”.
“In order for such an agreement to succeed, two component states should be created and the Greek Cypriot side must understand that Turkish Cypriots are equal partners. They are aware of this but they need to digest it,” said Gul.
Talat said Ankara’s support was of great significance to the Turkish Cypriot community. “We have no other support. We are working for a solution to the Cyprus problem. We asked for an expansion of the procedure with the participation of the EU and UN, but the Greek side keeps objecting, using its privileges.”
Talat also deemed it impossible to reach a solution by the end of the year. “It seems a solution in 2009 is not possible. It is our strong desire that negotiations are complete before the 2010 [Turkish Cypriot] presidential elections.”
“We desire a timeframe and an intervention by the UN. The negotiations can’t go on forever. If the whole procedure collapses, we have other alternative solutions, but we will not be discussing them at this phase.”
The Cyprus Mail’s satirical column Coffeeshop deals with the lynching last week of Toumzos Tsielepis, the president’s negotiations adviser, who appeared on a lunchtime Antenna TV panel discussion on the Cyprus problem together with four insufferably arrogant lawyers, competing over who would inflict the greatest humiliation on him until he finally walked out. It deserves to be released on DVD as a classic of the genre and could be a very useful tool for parents who do not want their kids to grow up to become lawyers. When the lawyers realised they were getting nowhere by shouting at the unpatriotic Tselepis, they raised the issue of his ‘poor qualifications’ which they claim is the reason comrade presidente is making big concessions to the Turks at the talks. As the grumpy old lawyer Loucis Loucaides, a former judge at the ECHR who finds difficulty stringing together a coherent sentence, asked: “Are you a lawyer?” Tselepis said “no” and Loucaides, with spittle coming out of his mouth, smugly responded, “And you will not become one”. It seems Tsielepis’ PhD in Public and International Law is not a satisfactory qualification for the lawyers on the panel. Why would he want to anyway? Why would anyone want to become a lawyer and end up a cantankerous, mean-spirited, patronising bully like Loucaides? It is not as if you need great intelligence or special qualities to join the profession – the Antenna studio panel made this obvious. The claim that you have to be a practising lawyer to be able to participate in the Cyprob talks was another stupidity expounded by one of our learned friends. Treating the Cyprob as a legal matter for lawyers to resolve is why there will never be a settlement. As one Cyprus-based diplomat astutely remarked many years ago, “How can you solve the Cyprus problem when there are 40,000 troops in the north and 30,000 lawyers in the south?”
Star of the show was the smooth-talking, self-regarding legal eagle Christos Clerides, who made his name as an anti-A plan campaigner and subsequently reaped big financial benefits by filing recourses to the ECHR for naive refugees, who thought this would be a better way of getting their properties back than voting for the plan. Clerides behaved like an ultra-competitive and insecure school-kid who will resort to the basest of methods to belittle his classmates in order to satisfy his feelings of superiority. “You have proved that you are not a lawyer because you constantly interrupt the other person... if you were a proper legal expert, you would know the first rule is that everyone must complete their argument, you take your notes and then respond.”
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