President Mehmet Ali Talat stated that he welcomed Papadopoulos’ proposal envisaging a meeting between the two leaders in this month to discuss the problems regarding the 8 July process.

Following is President Talat’s statement during a press conference held yesterday (10 July 2007):

“The Greek Cypriot Leader Mr. Tassos Papadopoulos has proposed a meeting to be held between the two leaders to discuss the problems encountered regarding the 8 July process. Being the party, which, for the last 10 months, has been reiterating that problems encountered in the process require a meeting between the two leaders;

However, I do not think that such a meeting would be adequate to solve all the problems encountered during the process. It would be quite difficult to take up all the discussions that took place in the course of a year in a single meeting. Therefore;

The Coordination Committee, which has worked very hard up until now, will continue its efforts and assist the leaders during this process.

As you will remember, following the exchange of lists as envisaged in the 8 July Agreement, we faced problems regarding the finalization of these lists. From that point onwards, the Turkish Cypriot side has stressed the need for a meeting between the two leaders to solve these problems. However, claiming that the conditions were not ripe for such a meeting, Greek Cypriot Leader Mr. Tassos Papadopoulos always rejected our proposal.

Nevertheless, we continuously repeated our proposal and reiterated at every level and at every opportunity that the leaders should be actively involved in the process so that it can be successful.

Today, it has become evident that one of the most important reasons of the problems encountered during the 8 July process is the fact that the leaders have not been directly involved in the process.

Since Mr. Papadopoulos has changed his stance and gave the green light for a meeting between the two leaders, now there is a ray of hope to save the process, which has come to a deadlock.

However, many other measures should be taken to render the process productive. One of these measures is to maintain the process at the leaders’ level with the support of the Coordination Committee. It should be clear by now that the approach of requiring a preparatory period prior to the meeting of the two leaders is not an appropriate approach. In relation to this, I wish to discuss other measures to be taken to ensure the effectiveness of this process with Mr. Papadopoulos during our first meeting.”

Co-President of the European Greens and member of the European Parliament’s High-Level Contact Group for Relations with Turkish Cypriots, Monica Frassoni said: “Greek Cypriots do not want to spend any effort towards a solution, because they think that this would be in their interest.”