Foreign Minister Tahsin Ertuğruloğlu said that if negotiations continue, they should be held on a “state to state” basis.

Ertuğruloğlu evaluated the Cyprus negotiations process and answered a few questions in a programme on Genç TV.

Responding to the question “Have the negotiations collapsed?” Foreign Minister Ertuğruloğlu said, “I did not have any expectations from the beginning of the negotiation process”.

Ertuğruloğlu stressed that negotiation processes have been based on inequality instead of equality in Cyprus.

Arguing that 50 years of the Turkish Cypriot people have been “stolen” by the UN, Ertuğruloğlu noted that the stance of the Greek Cypriot side has not changed at all in the 50 years that the negotiations have been ongoing, as they keep seeing the Turkish Cypriots as a minority and they continue pursuing non-equality policies.

Upon a question regarding the Greek Cypriot side’s call to “return to the table”, Ertuğruloğlu said that the Greek Cypriot side keeps perpetuating an open-ended negotiation process and they have no intention to end it. Referring to recent statements saying that “almost everything is over in the negotiations”, Ertuğruloğlu said that the Greek Cypriot side thinks that the only problem left to solve is the “guarantors” one, but that these statements are misleading.

Foreign Minister Ertuğruloğlu also said that the Greek Cypriots will always evoke a crisis in order to avoid a referendum and they can evoke a crisis in the field of natural gas and oil; Ertuğruloğlu added that he had not predicted that this crisis would come out with the Enosis decision.

Emphasizing that the Turkish people reacted to the Enosis decision, Ertuğruloğlu said that this decision represents the real policy objectives of the Greek Cypriot side and that the Cyprus negotiation process has been conducted together with Turkey because the Cyprus problem is a national case.

Finally, he stated that in order to guarantee the political equality of the Turkish Cypriot people, a rotating presidency and a guarantor system, which gives Turkey the right of intervention, are a condition. Furthermore, he said that while the policies proposed by the Turkish Cypriot people don’t risk the security of the Greek Cypriot people, the Greek Cypriot side’s policies do threaten the security of the Turkish Cypriots .