Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades on Monday evening launched a fiery attack against UN Cyprus envoy Espen Barth Eide accusing him of lying about the failure of the talks in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, earlier this month.
“It is sad, really sad, people who supposedly express international law, as the UN Secretary General special adviser, to lie in public in a bid to cover Ankara’s intransigence,” Anastasides told a gathering of Kyrenia refugees marking the dark anniversary of the Turkish invasion.
“What they don’t know is that their minutes and ours …will be made public to reveal who is telling the truth,” he added.
Eide said he attributed what happened to a “collective failure” and that a deal could have been reached that all parties could have lived with.
Eide met with Anastasiades at the Presidential Palace early on Monday and with Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci in the afternoon.
Government Spokesman Nicos Christodoulides told journalists after the Eide meeting with Anastasiades that the President had called the UN envoy out on his comments.
“The President of the Republic has made a strict demarche to Mr Eide for what he has said publicly about the reasons for the negative result in Crans-Montana,” Christodoulides said.
And, if there are continued reports “that do not correspond to reality there will be no other choice but to put on the public record what happened in Crans-Montana” he added.
He also said this was not a threat. “It is a matter for the people of Cyprus to know exactly… and when I say the Cypriot people, I mean both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots… what exactly happened in Crans-Montana.”
