New
Coalition Government in North to Work Toward Settlement
Washington,
D.C. - Serdar Denktash's Democrat Party, the junior member of the
two-party government defeated in the December 14 elections in the north,
agreed to enter into a coalition with Mehmet Ali Talat's Republican
People's Party, giving prime minister-designate Talat the 26 seats needed
in the 50-seat Turkish Cypriot assembly to form a narrow working majority.
Denktash
will serve as deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs in a
cabinet in which his party, with seven assembly seats, will have four
portfolios and Talat's party, with 19 seats, will have six posts.
Talat,
whose party is the largest in the assembly, campaigned on a
pro-settlement, pro-EU platform that supported the Annan plan as a basis
for settlement negotiations. Denktash has long opposed the Annan plan,
along with his father, Rauf Denktash, who still serves as president of the
self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). However, the
younger Denktash joined Talat in pledging that the new government would
attempt to reach a settlement by the time Cyprus becomes an EU member on
May 1 through talks focusing on a paper being prepared in Ankara
concerning changes to the Annan plan. Talat said the Turkish Cypriot
government would also make contributions to the paper, which will be
finalized during a National Security Council meeting in Ankara on January
23.
Rauf
Denktash will continue to be the Turkish Cypriot negotiator under the new
government, despite Talat's statement during the campaign that he would
replace him. Talat feared that Denktash's stance against the Annan plan
would derail any chance of resuming negotiations, which collapsed in March
2003 after Denktash rejected the plan. After the December 14 elections,
the Turkish government stated that it wanted Denktash to remain as
negotiator.
Following
talks with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as coalition
arrangements in northern Cyprus were being finalized, Rauf Denktash
reversed his earlier stance that the Annan plan was "ead and
buried" by stating that the plan "is still on the table"
and "we will sit and discuss" it. He noted that "efforts
are continuing on trying to bring the Annan plan into an acceptable state
. . . Ankara is working on the plan to remove the traps." Erdogan and
Denktash said the search for a settlement should be carried out through
close cooperation between Turkey and northern Cyprus.
Mustafa
Akinci's Peace and Democracy Movement, which holds six seats in the
Turkish Cypriot assembly, is expected to support the governing coalition
during parliamentary votes. This pro-settlement, pro-EU party, which
favors the Annan plan, was allied with Talat's party in the election
campaign, but it is not included in the coalition government.
The
main opposition party, with 18 seats, is the National Unity Party of
former TRNC prime minister Dervis Eroglu, which opposes the Annan plan and
was the partner of Serdar Denktash's party in the recently defeated
governing coalition.
Turkey's
proposals concerning the Annan plan will be conveyed to U.N. Secretary
General Kofi Annan on January 25, when Erdogan meets with him on the
sidelines of the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland,
and to President George W. Bush, when the prime minister holds talks with
him in Washington on January 28. Bush is expected to strongly urge Erdogan
to act decisively in persuading the Turkish Cypriots to negotiate a Cyprus
settlement by May 1.
In
a mid-January letter to Cyprus President Tassos Papadopoulos, who accepts
the Annan plan as a basis for negotiations, Annan stated that the U.N. did
not intend to re-engage in the negotiation process until the parties
involved showed genuine political will to work for a solution and agreed
to put the plan to a referendum.
The
secretary general's letter was in response to a December 17 letter from
Papadopoulos, in which the Cyprus president, who would like to see changes
in the plan, said he was ready to return to the negotiating table and
asked the secretary general to call for a resumption of the talks. In his
letter, Annan also referred to an April 2003 U.N. report in which he asked
the two sides to show commitment to finalizing the Annan plan “without
negotiating its basic principles or essential trade-offs.”
