Schussel Increases Pressure On Turkey Over Cyprus

by Lorys Charalambous, for LawAndTax-News.com, Cyprus

24 February 2006

Speaking on Tuesday following a meeting with Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos, Austria's Federal Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, the current President of the Council of the EU, warned that Turkey has until the end of the year to recognise the Cypriot government and open its ports and airports to Cypriot-flagged vessels.

“The Austrian Presidency is doing everything in its power to support the current UN-sponsored process”, the Chancellor stated, continuing:

“We know the situation is very complex and difficult and that it will not be easy to solve this conflict."

Chancellor Schüssel spoke of a “window of opportunity” to decouple the issues of bilateral Cypriot-Turkish trade relations from those of the Financial Protocol.

“It is in our interest to find ways of achieving a solution acceptable to both sides”, Schüssel stressed.

Although Turkey has signed an accord extending its pre-existing customs accord with the EU to the ten new member states, it stated last year that this would not entail lifting the embargo on Cypriot vessels, a step which, the government argued, can only take place once the EU moves to end Northern Cyprus' trade isolation.

It had been hoped that new proposals put forward by the Turkish authorities last month would represent at least a small step towards ending the stalemate, but they were met with little enthusiasm by the Greek and Greek Cypriot governments when they were released.

The Turkish authorities again offered to open the country's ports and airports to Cyprus in return for restrictions being lifted on the Turkish-occupied north, and additionally called for high-level talks on uniting the Island to begin again later this year.

Cypriot Foreign Minister, George Iacovou dismissed them at the time as "reheated food".

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