Jack Straw
Jack Straw, the former British Foreign Secretary snubbed by the late President Tassos Papadopoulos for meeting in the north with a Turkish Cypriot leader in 2006, is calling on the international community to accept the division of Cyprus.
Straw has often in the past brought up the issue of two states in Cyprus, and in an interview with Turkish news agency Anadolu in London on Tuesday he said the island’s division needed to be accepted as a reality.
“If it had been possible for there to be a happy, united island, well, that would be the best solution, with a bi-zonal, bi-communal constitution. But the majority of people living on the island in the Greek-Cypriot part don’t want to accept that,” Straw said.
He referred back to the 2004 referendum on the Annan Plan, which was rejected by the majority of Greek Cypriots saying the failure of negotiations was not the fault of the Turkish Cypriots.
“So my view is the international community should accept the reality that there is division and that you have partition,” he said. “And then these two rather small nations would be able to develop their own relationship and I think it would be a cleaner system.”
Küfi Seydali