WASHINGTON 

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s call to the international community during his UN speech last week to recognize the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) was “extremely important and meaningful,” TRNC’s foreign minister said Wednesday. 

Speaking to a group of reporters in Washington, Tahsin Ertugruloglu said: “It is extremely meaningful and important that Mr. President Erdogan brought the recognition of the TRNC to the agenda of the international community in a platform like the UN General Assembly.”

“While these are happening, we do not expect that everything will change overnight,” he said. “We have started a process that will be difficult.”

During his speech to the UN General Assembly last week, Erdogan urged the international community to recognize TRNC’s “sovereignty and establish diplomatic, political, and economic ties.”

Cyprus has been mired in a decades-long dispute between Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots despite a series of diplomatic efforts by the UN to achieve a comprehensive settlement.

Türkiye fully supports a two-state solution on the island based on sovereign equality and equal international status between its two states.

On TRNC’s observer status at the Organization of Turkic States (OTS), Ertugruloglu said it was a “positive development.”

“It is very meaningful and important that we became an observer member of the organization of Turkic states for the first time with our official name, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and our flag,” he said, noting that TRNC is already an observer member of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

“We expect new steps to be taken there too. I can say that the recognition process of TRNC has now started,” he said.

Accusing the UN Security Council of creating the “Cyprus problem,” Ertugruloglu said Erdogan’s statement that the “world is bigger than five” is “meaningful.”

“With this structure, the UN is not an organization that has solved even a single political problem,” he said.

“Cyprus is not the name of a country. Cyprus is the name of an island that has two states, two national entities, each one represented by his own, separate sovereign state,” he said.​​​​​​​

“We wasted 60 years,” regarding the negotiation process, he said, that “has absolutely no chance of success, because it is not based on equality.”

“For any negotiating process to have any chance of success, the parties sitting at the table must be equals, absolute equals, if one is more equal than the other, there is no way you can get off the table as equals,” he added.