Cyprus ‘the most important element of Greek foreign policy’

Cyprus is “the most important element of Greek foreign policy”, Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis said on Friday.

Addressing his country’s parliament, he said that the island constitutes “the immediate and major priority of our national foreign policy” and that it “will never be abandoned”.

“In this term, informal discussions on the resolution of the Cyprus problem were restarted after having remained stagnant after Crans-Montana and have already brought results,” he said.

The results to which he was referring include the election of pro-reunification candidate Tufan Erhurman as Turkish Cypriot leader in October last year, with Gerapetritis saying at the time that Erhurman’s election “opens a new chapter of hope and expectations for the island’s reunification”.

Such a reunification, he said, must come about “on the basis of the United Nations general assembly and security council’s resolutions”, and will “guarantee peace and prosperity for Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots within the European family”.

“We look forward to working together on the next step in the upcoming informal meeting in a broader format. Divisions have no place in the modern, turbulent international landscape. Cyprus must convey the universal message of synthesis and unity.”

UN envoy Maria Angela Holguin is widely expected to return to the island to meet both Erhurman and President Nikos Christodoulides later this month, with a fresh enlarged meeting set to take place in the weeks that follow.

That enlarged meeting will bring together the island’s two sides, its three guarantor powers, Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, and the UN, though Erhurman said last month that it “should not be held without prior agreements on certain issues in Nicosia”.

Away from the matter of the Cyprus problem, Gerapetritis on Friday confirmed that he will attend the funeral of late Cypriot president George Vassiliou in Nicosia on Saturday, describing Vassiliou as “a truly very important politician who left a very strong mark”.

He also confirmed that on Sunday, he will travel alongside his Cypriot counterpart Constantinos Kombos to Egypt for a trilateral meeting with the country’s Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty.

The trio last held a tripartite meeting on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York in September last year, with the Cypriot foreign ministry saying at the time that they had “reviewed the trilateral cooperation” between the three countries “in the fields of security, energy, and shipping”, and also “discussed regional developments”.

That meeting came after President Nikos Christodoulides had met the prime ministers of both countries, Mostafa Madbouly of Egypt and Kyriakos Mitsotakis of Greece, with both meetings centred on the matter of energy, as Cyprus attempts to construct an electricity interconnecting cable to Greece and export liquefied natural gas to Europe via Egypt.