Cypriots have “no different selection” however to try to overturn the divided island’s establishment, President Nikos Christodoulides mentioned on Friday.
Talking on the opening of a photographic exhibition created to mark 50 years since Turkey’s invasion of the island, he mentioned the present state of affairs “can’t be the way forward for our homeland”, regardless of what he described as “the challenges, difficulties, and issues we face”.
“We’re due to this fact working on this route with actions and never with phrases with the intention to create the prospects for the resumption of considerable negotiations with the goal of discovering an answer to the Cyprus drawback,” he mentioned.
He reiterated his place that such an answer should be discovered on the idea of a bizonal, bicommunal federation, “and with European rules and values as its basis”.
For that reason, he mentioned, the federal government is “encouraging” the efforts of United Nations Secretary-Common Antonio Guterres and his lately departed envoy on the island Maria Angela Holguin.
On the matter of Holguin, he mentioned June can be a “essential month”, with Holguin’s report on her contacts on the island set to be written and submitted.
“We hope for constructive developments,” he mentioned, including that the federal government is being knowledgeable about developments, “particularly by international locations which present a particular curiosity” within the Cyprus drawback.
Talking concerning the images on show, he mentioned they “file in probably the most graphic method the ache on the faces of tens, a whole bunch, hundreds of individuals, our compatriots.”
“These individuals are not strangers. They’re our mother and father, our grandparents, our kin, our neighbours. They’re all those that had the unparalleled fortitude, will, and religion to rise from the ruins of that catastrophe and stroll once more,” he mentioned.
He added that these displaced had “rebuilt their lives from scratch because of their exhausting work and patriotism”.
“Though half a century has handed, the ache is profound and the agony indescribable each time one’s reminiscence turns to the occasions of 1974, the Turkish invasion, the destruction … which is an unshakeable level of reference for each citizen of this place,” he mentioned.
He added that that is the case “regardless of how a lot some attempt to downplay it”, describing the occasions of 1974 as an “unspeakable tragedy”.
