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General News
Meropi Kyriacou Honored as TNH Educator of the Year
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
NICOSIA – Turkish-Cypriot hardline leader Ersin Tatar, who has rejected reunification of the island divided by unlawful 1974 Turkish invasions and demanded the world accept the rogue, isolated state, said a Turkish army on the occupied side will never leave.
He said the 35,000 troops on the northern third are necessary to protect Turkish-Cypriots but their presence, along with demands by then Turkish-Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in July 2017 for the right of further military intervention, scuttled unity talks at the Swiss resort of Crans-Montana.
The presence of Turkish soldiers on the occupied side is “of vital importance to us as a deterrent force,” he said during a joint news conference with Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yilmaz in Nicosia, said Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News.
He didn’t mention that the United Nations has long had a peacekeeping force on the island patrolling the buffer zone between the legitimate Greek-Cypriot government that’s a member of the European Union and the occupied side.
Turkey, Greece and the United Kingdom, the former Colonial ruler that has military bases on the island, are guarantors of security as well but the standing Turkish army has proved to be a deal breaker for any hopes of bringing the island back together again.
Tatar and Erdogan want a two-state solution with permanent partition, but that’s been ignored by the UN, which wants a bi-zonal federation, an idea that has failed to be agreed up on despite a long line of diplomats trying to bring accord.
Tatar stated that he will go to New York on Sept. 22 for the UN’s General Assembly annual opening and plans to meet with Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who was at the Swiss debacle and later blamed neither side for the failure.
“If a negotiation process is to start, I will express our insistence that our demands are absolutely fulfilled. We are pursuing this new policy in consultation with Turkey, the motherland, and with your full support,” he said, Guterres having ignored all that before.
