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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.
Turkish-Cypriot hardline leader Ersin Tatar has repeated his insistence – this time to Greece – that Cyprus, divided by unlawful 1974 Turkish invasions that seized the northern third of the island shouldn’t be reunified, but remain permanently split.
He said that would be constituted by two separate states and the United Nations and world recognizing the rogue state that’s been occupied by Turkish-Cypriots for 50 years and who are isolated, accepted only by Turkey as a so-called republic.
Greece and Turkey are in a detente period in which tensions have been ratcheted down in trying to resolve disputes over the sovereignty of the seas but Cyprus has been left off the table in the talks.
That led Tatar to tell Greece’s government the answer lies in the country acknowledging the existence of “two peoples, two states, and two democracies” on the island, said the news site Turkiye Today.
He was speaking at a news conference at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, although the occupied territory isn’t a member but Tatar allowed to go there and for the past few years has made the same demands that were ignored.
“Talks should explore whether there is common ground,” he said, although he earlier said those would be on the basis of his demands, not the UN’s framework for a bizonal, bifederal solution he said can’t work.
“Unfortunately, the Greek-Cypriot leadership continues to intensify policies of oppression and obstruction against Turkish-Cypriots, which we deeply regret,” Tatar said, without giving any examples, but wanting permanent partition.
Greece, along with Turkey and the United Kingdom – the island’s former Colonial ruler, which still has a military base there, are the guarantors of security along with a UN peacekeeping force separating the two sides.
The last round of reunification talks collapsed in July, 2017 at the Swiss resort of Crans-Montana when then Turkish-Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said a 35,000-strong army would never leave the occupied side and over their demands for the right of further military intervention.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who was at the debacle, later issued a report blaming neither side for the talks failures and has sent yet another envoy to the island, who hasn’t made any progress either.
