Montana

U.N. Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Cyprus Espen Barth Eide will be presenting the Security Council an assessment of the past two years of the Cyprus peacemaking efforts, which ended last week in Crans-Montana with a crash landing. What will he say?

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Turkey bears “serious responsibilities” for the collapse of Cyprus talks in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, which has led to an impasse and the failure of the International Conference on Cyprus, revealing and reaffirming Turkey’s true intentions towards international law and UN resolutions.

The full statement of the Foreign Ministry is as follows:

As long as the Greek Cypriots believe the island only belongs to them and the Turkish Cypriot people are a minority (that might be accorded a special status with some privileged rights), there can never be a bi-zonal or bi-communal federal settlement that the two sides have agreed to establish in principle back in 1977.

Greece has blamed Turkey for the collapse of the talks on Friday to reunify divided Cyprus saying Ankara willfully "drove the Crans-Montana conference to an impasse" and revealed its true intention to perpetuate its military presence on the island, countering international law and the resolutions of the United Nations.  

Translated from the original Greek by George Gilson

Turkish Foreign Ministry's spokesman on July 8 criticized Greek Foreign Minister's remarks over the Cyprus issue.

After a series of failed Cyprus reunification talks between the representatives from the EU, the Turkish and Greek Cypriot leaderships in Swiss Alps, Greece's Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias blamed Turkish side for having 'intervention rights'.

After nine days of intensive talks aimed at finally reunifying Cyprus, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres declared on Friday that UN-buffered peace talks had once again failed, marking the dramatic culmination of a process that lasted more than two years.

Talks to reunite the island of Cyprus ended in failure in Crans-Montana on early July 6, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu has said.

"Unfortunately, the Cyprus talks in Crans-Montana failed despite all efforts," Çavuşoğlu told reporters. 

"It was the last conference and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he concluded this conference," he added.  

High-level talks in the Swiss Alpine resort of Crans-Montana hit a brick wall in the early hours of Friday morning with no deal on a strategic agreement that could have paved the way for a comprehensive settlement of the decades-old Cyprus problem decades-old Cyprus problem.

At the beginning of the Crans-Montana summit on Cyprus, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres provided the process with a golden touch, asking the two sides to prepare packages answering all six chapters of a probable Cyprus compromise deal.