“Eighty percent of Turkish Cypriots were born in Cyprus after 1974! No one can challenge the fact they are a nation and a country,” the honorary chairman and founder of Crans Montana Forum Ambassador Jean-Paul Carteron said in a tweet late Wednesday.
“We are not anymore in 1815 in Vienna,” he said, referring to the The Congress of Vienna, which was one of the most prominent international diplomatic conferences in the history of Europe that led to the reconstitution of the European political order after the downfall of the French Emperor Napoleon I.
“We cannot redesign the world with a pen and scissors,” he added.
Carteron's remarks came amid the ongoing Cyprus talks in Geneva.
Earlier on the same day, the President of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), Ersin Tatar said that his country is standing firm on the need for a two-state solution.
"We expressed our own views clearly. Of course, there is no change in our position and there won't be," Tatar told journalists in Geneva after his 40-minute presentation on the issue.
The Crans-Montana talks, which began on June 28, 2017 and were monitored by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres's Special Adviser on Cyprus Espen Barth Eide, failed after 10 days of intense discussions.
The Greek Cypriot side leaked files, which the U.N. had classified as confidential, to the Greek media before sending them to the U.N. and the Turkish side, and while the Greeks never strayed from their discourse of "zero troops, zero guarantee," they also did not take any constructive steps toward offers and suggestions.
On the first day, the Greeks leaked a scenario to the press claiming that the Turkish side and Turkey are ready to give up on withdrawing 80 percent of the troops from the island. This claim was immediately denied by the Turkish Foreign Ministry.
