Turkey summoned Greece’s envoy Friday for a despicable headline in a Greek newspaper about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, according to Ankara’s foreign minister.
Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said the Foreign Ministry had a harsh response to Greek Ambassador Michael-Christos Diamessis for a vulgar headline in Greek newspaper, Demokratia, about Erdoğan.
“INSULTS SHOULD NOT BE EVALUATED THIS WAY”
Çavuşoğlu told Anadolu Agency that it was natural for news outlets in both countries to criticize each other’s politicians — sometimes severely – but under the principle of freedom of the press, insults should not be evaluated this way.
This shows the level to which the newspaper has sunk, he added.
Çavuşoğlu expressed approval of a statement about the headline by the Greek Foreign Ministry, which he said strongly condemned the incident.
However, he stressed that there is no point in embarking on new initiatives in Cyrpus which are doomed to fail. “We can’t start again where we left off. It’s not possible for us to start negotiations from the point that the Crans-Montana talks were launched. Now that the negotiations are over, it has failed,” he said. “We have said over and over again that we will no longer negotiate for a federation on the Cyprus issue.”
Çavuşoğlu stated that after his meeting with the President of the Greek Cypriot Administration Nikos Anastasiadis, he said that negotiating for a federation on the island would no longer be beneficial and that a two-state solution should be negotiated.
At an informal meeting during the UN General Assembly in New York, Anastasiadis said he could not find the necessary support from the international community for a two-state solution and shared his ideas that a confederation of two states would be healthier, Çavuşoğlu said.
