Opposition leader Mehmet Ali Talat won Sunday’s presidential elections in northern Cyprus, pledging to lead the breakaway Turkish Cypriot community back to peace talks with the Greek Cypriots in the south.
Talat won 55.6% of the polls, with a lower 70% voter turnout from the assembly election he narrowly won a month earlier.
This confirms an earlier poll by KADEM polling agency published by the Financial Mirror online on Friday giving him a clear 54% of the vote.
“I am ready to begin talks with the Greek Cypriot community leader,” the 52-year leftist leader told reporters, adding that he will call upon the United Nations Secretary General to resume negotiations to reunify the island.
“I want to form a new partnership with the Greek Cypriots, for a new Cyprus, united as it should have been under the [U.N.’s] Annan Plan,” Talat said.
He raised his Turkish Republican Party’s (CTP) hold by eleven percentage polls, while his main rival, pro-Ankara Dervis Eroglu saw his nationalist UBP party lose ground dropping ten points to 22.8% in these elections.
The Democratic Party’s Mustafa Arapacioglu garnered just over 13%, as much as they won in the parliamentary elections that awarded them a coalition partnership with Talat’s government.
Talat’s victory marked an end to the 50-year rule of hardline leader Rauf Denktash who never wanted peace with the Greek Cypriots.
Exiting from the special polling center set up at the main courthouse in the Turkish part of Nicosia, a furious Denktash blasted President Tasos Papadopoulos, whom he regards responsible for guerrilla warfare against Turkish Cypriots in the 1960s.
“I am angry with Tasos Papadopoulos and the Greek Cypriots, who refuse to apologise for the murders [of Turkish Cypriots] from 1960 to 1974,” the 81-year old veteran leader said, saying the Greek Cypriots never paid compensation for the bicommunal strife that divided the communities and resulted in the Turkish invasion in 1974.
“They want to turn the island into a Greek Cyprus, and us into a minority with no rights,” Denktash said.
Analysts expect Talat’s win to boost Turkey’s hopes of aspiring to some day join the European Union, as Rauf Denktash, supported by the powerful military leadership, was seen as a liability by Prime Minister Reccep Tayip Erdogan and told not to seek reelection.
“Denktash did not want the reunification of Cyprus,” former President George Vassiliou said, adding that the Turkish Cypriot leader “wanted two separate entities on the island” earning him the title of ‘intransigent’.
Denktash has been the Turkish Cypriot negotiator since Britain handed the island independence in 1960 and has survived five Greek Cypriot presidents through a multitude of failed U.N. peace talks.
The ball is now in the Greek Cypriot camp, with Tasos Papadopoulos obliged to show a willingness to resume talks with Talat towards reunification, despite urging his people to reject the Annan Plan in a referendum last year, a call Greek Cypriots followed overwhelmingly.
Mehmet Ali Talat will be busy assuming his presidential role and walking a tightrope between the military’s desire to keep northern Cyprus as an outpost with 35,000 troops and his community’s wish to exit the political and economic isolation that prevented them from joining the Greek Cypriots who acceded to an enlarged E.U. last May.
For now, his wife, Oyie Talat, has received two olive trees from Turkish Cypriot youths that she will plant at the entrance of the presidential residence when they move in over the next few days, describing the symbolic offering as “a future of peace.”
