Turkey's president says his support for a two-state deal on ethnically split Cyprus is absolute
By MENELAOS HADJICOSTIS
Turkish Cypriots on Sunday celebrated Turkey's military invasion of Cyprus that cleaved the island nation along ethnic lines 51 years ago. Turkey's president reaffirmed his full backing for a controversial peace deal that envisions the establishment of two separate states.
It's a proposal that the majority Greek Cypriots in the island's internationally recognized southern part reject out of hand. It would formalize Cyprus' partition and give Turkey a permanent foothold they see as a bid for control of the entire, strategically situated country and its offshore hydrocarbon wealth.
'Our support for (Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar's) vision for a two-state solution is absolute,' Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in remarks to a crowd during celebrations that culminated with a military parade. It was scheduled this year for the evening to avoid the worst of the scorching mid-summer's heat.
'It is time for the international community to come to terms with the facts on the ground,' Erdogan added, urging the international community to establish diplomatic and economic relations with the breakaway state in Cyprus' northern third that Turkish Cypriots declared in 1983.
Turkey's invasion came in the immediate aftermath of a coup staged by Athens junta-backed supporters of uniting Cyprus with Greece. Currently, only Turkey recognizes the Turkish Cypriot declaration of independence and maintains 35,000 troops in the north.
Erdogan's renewed support for a two-state deal came just days after Tatar, the island's Greek Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides, the foreign ministers of 'guarantor' powers Greece and Turkey, and Britain's minister of state for Europe gathered at U.N. headquarters in New York for meetings with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to end an eight-year moratorium on formal peace negotiations.
The meeting achieved little in the way of a return to fully fledged negotiations as Tatar insisted on recognition for the breakaway Turkish Cypriot state as a prerequisite. The meeting did, however, achieve some progress on a number of confidence-building measures such the exchange of cultural artifacts and the setting up of an advisory committee on civil society.
Guterres said he'll meet again with Tatar and Christodoulides in September and hold another wider meeting after a Turkish Cypriot leadership election in October in which Tatar is running on a two-state platform.
Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots insist a two-state deal is the only way forward because decades of U.N.-mediated peace talks based on a U.N. Security Council endorsed framework of reunifying Cyprus as a federation no longer had any meaning.
That switch came after the last big push for a peace accord in the summer of 2017. It fell through on what Greek Cypriots said was a Turkish and Turkish Cypriot insistence on keeping a permanent Turkish troop presence on the island and enshrining military intervention rights for Turkey as part of any deal. Greek Cypriots also rejected a demand for blanket veto powers for the minority Turkish Cypriots on all government decisions.
In the south where Greek Cypriots commemorated the invasion with solemn memorials to the war dead, Christodoulides said the international community gives no support to a two-state deal. He said Turkey's continuing 'occupation of European territory' subverts its ambitions for closer European Union ties and undermines the role it wishes to play in the region.
© Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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They will also look for clues about a possible leaders' summit because any real deal will hinge on the two presidents meeting each other, he said. Fentanyl-related tariffs are likely a focus for China In Stockholm, Beijing will likely demand the removal of the 20% fentanyl-related tariff that Trump imposed earlier this year, said Sun Yun, director of the China program at the Washington-based Stimson Center. This round of the U.S.-China trade dispute began with fentanyl, when Trump in February imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese goods, citing that China failed to curb the outflow of the chemicals used to make the drug. The following month, Trump added another 10% tax for the same reason. Beijing retaliated with extra duties on some U.S. goods, including coal, liquefied natural gas, and farm products such as beef, chicken, pork and soy. 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Gabriel Wildau, managing director at the consultancy Teneo, said he doesn't expect any tariff to go away in Stockholm but that tariff relief could be part of a final trade deal. 'It's possible that Trump would cancel the 20% tariff that he has explicitly linked with fentanyl, but I would expect the final tariff level on China to be at least as high as the 15-20% rate contained in the recent deals with Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam,' Wildau said. US wants China to dump less, buy less oil from Russia and Iran China's industrial overcapacity is as much a headache for the United States as it is for the European Union. Even Beijing has acknowledged the problem but suggested it might be difficult to address. America's trade imbalance with China has decreased from a peak of $418 billion in 2018, according to the Census Bureau. But China has found new markets for its goods and as the world's dominant manufacturer ran a global trade surplus approaching $1 trillion last year — somewhat larger than the size of the U.S. overall trade deficit in 2024. And China's emergence as a manufacturer of electric vehicles and other emerging technologies has suddenly made it more of a financial and geopolitical threat for those same industries based in the U.S., Europe, Japan and South Korea. 'Some enterprises, especially manufacturing enterprises, feel more deeply that China's manufacturing capabilities are too strong, and Chinese people are too hardworking. Factories run 24 hours a day,' Chinese Premier Li Qiang said on Thursday when hosting European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Beijing. 'Some people think this will cause some new problems in the balance of supply and demand in world production.' 'We see this problem too,' Li said. Bessent also said the Stockholm talks could address Chinese purchases of Russian and Iranian oil. However, Wildau of Teneo said China could demand some U.S. security concessions in exchange, such as a reduced U.S. military presence in East Asia and scaled-back diplomatic support for Taiwan and the Philippines. This would likely face political pushback in Washington. The Stockholm talks will be 'geared towards building a trade agreement based around Chinese purchase commitments and pledges of investment in the U.S. in exchange for partial relief from U.S. tariffs and export controls,' Wildau said. He doubts there will be a grand deal. Instead, he predicts 'a more limited agreement based around fentanyl.' 'That,' he said, 'is probably the preferred outcome for China hawks in the Trump administration, who worry that an overeager Trump might offer too much to Xi.'
