Roundup: Cypriot President says Cyprus solution rests with Turkey

Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday that a solution to the Cyprus problem rests with Turkey.

Anastasiades said that during the new negotiating round progress has been achieved in a number of issues on almost all chapters of the Cyprus problem, according to the text of his address to the General Assembly released in Nicosia.

However, he said that on other substantive issues there are significant differences that need to be resolved.

"Differences that, in order to be resolved, would also require Turkey's active and determined contribution, considering that its occupation forces still remain in the northern part of our country," the Cypriot President said.

Anastasiades and Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci have been engaged since the middle of this year in negotiations brokered by the United Nations.

They are currently discussing the future of properties left by thousands of people, mostly Greek Cypriots, who left their houses during the 1974 fighting.

Turkey, reacting to a coup by Greek junta army officers in July, 1974, occupied 37 per cent of the Cypriot territory and relocated almost all Turkish Cypriots making 20 per cent of the population in the occupied area of the eastern Mediterranean island forcing out the Greek Cypriot population.

The negotiations are centered on the criteria to be applied by a joint commission in deciding whether properties will be returned to their original owners or be allocated to current users, both Turkish Cypriots and mainland Turkey settlers.

Anastasiades did not say on which issues Turkey has to act.

But he has repeatedly let it be known that Turkey must withdraw its occupation troops from Cyprus, move several thousand Turkish settlers and terminate guarantor status.

Before he left for New York, Anastasiades said that Cyprus, as a modern European state, does not need and will not accept continuation of the guarantor status given to Turkey, Greece and Britain under the terms of the 1960 Treaty of Establishment of the Cyprus Republic.

Turkey maintains that it favors a solution to the Cyprus problem but has never made clear its position of the issue of guarantees and the withdrawal of its troops from Cyprus.

"I do hope that rhetoric assurances of Turkey's desire to reaching a settlement will be at last tested in practice, through the adoption of concrete steps that will positively underpin the negotiating process and correspond to the climate of hope prevailing in the island," Anastasiades told the General Assembly. Endit