Greek Cyprus President Demetris Christofias likens EU-Turkey relations to Nazi appeasement
rick murphy
Greek Cyprus President Demetris Christofias: ".. don't challenge
Turkey because it will get angry.."
By that Christofias means "Do not kill Turks. Beacuse Turkiye become
very angry"
Christofias likens EU-Turkey relations to Nazi appeasement
Friday, October 30, 2009
ISTANBUL – Hürriyet Daily News
Greek Cyprus President Demetris Christofias says his expectations have
not been justified in his talks with Turkish Cypriot President Mehmet
Ali Talat. He says concessions to Ankara could backfire as talks on
divided island hit trouble
Greek Cyprus President Demetris Christofias said Turkey did not abide
by the rules during her accession process to the European Union, or
EU, and that the EU made concessions to Turkey, reported the British
daily Guardian on Thursday. Christofias likened the EU's concessions
to Ankara to the appeasement of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, the report
added.
Christofias said that more than a year of negotiations with his
Turkish Cypriot counterpart Mehmet Ali Talat was in trouble.
"Unfortunately, my expectations have not been justified," he said. "We
have differences and divergences, deep, deep differences."
Christofias's gloomy remarks ran counter to diplomats' hopes that the
Greek and Turkish Cypriot leaders represented the best chance for a
settlement in a generation.
Both leaders, who are both on the left, have been conducting
negotiations for more than a year. Talat, however, is widely tipped to
lose power in presidential elections in Turkish-occupied northern
Cyprus next April to nationalist hardliners, so the duo may have only
months to strike a deal.
Christofias rejected talk of a deadline as artificial and suggested
the Turkish side was exploiting Talat's electoral problems to
blackmail him.
If the talks fail, warned Hans Van Den Broek, the former Dutch foreign
minister who sits on the Independent Commission on Turkey, "the island
will certainly head towards partition. Tensions will rise in the
eastern Mediterranean and EU-Turkey tension will deepen."
With much at stake in the Cyprus talks, Christofias laid a large part
of the blame for the stalemate on the Turkish leadership of Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. "We don't agree on anything with
Erdoğan," he said.
Hopes for a solution to the Cyprus problem have been raised by the
approach adopted by Greece's new prime minister, George Papandreou,
who visited Turkey shortly after he was elected, where he met Erdoğan.
The fate of the Cyprus settlement talks is crucial to Turkey's bid to
join the EU. Swathes of the complex membership negotiations between
Ankara and Brussels are frozen because of Greek Cypriot objections.
Christofias warned that any European concessions to Ankara to keep
Turkey on a pro-European path could backfire.
"I don't compare Turkey with Nazi Germany," he said. "But it is not
reasonable to say don't challenge Turkey because it will get angry.
There are rules and unfortunately Turkey does not respect those
rules ... This reminds me of the situation before the second world
war, appeasing Hitler so he doesn't become more aggressive. The
substance of fascism was the substance of fascism. Hitler was Hitler."