Chrisostomides was responding to the proposal by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for holding a peace conference on Cyprus to be attended by the three guarantor powers of Cyprus' independence (Turkey, Britain and Greece), the Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot sides.

The Cypriot government believes that Erdogan's proposal was aimed at putting on an equal par the Turkish Cypriot regime with the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus, he said.

Cyprus, an eastern Mediterranean island, has been divided into the Greek Cypriot-controlled south and Turkish Cypriot-controlled north since the Turkish invasion in 1974 in the wake of a short-lived coup seeking union with Greece.

Nine years after the division of the island, the Turkish Cypriotside established a breakaway state "the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus", which is recognized only by Turkey.

The United Nations has been trying for years to find a comprehensive settlement to the protracted Cyprus problem, but so far no tangible results have been achieved.

The latest effort to secure a Cyprus solution collapsed earlier this month in The Hague, after Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash refused to agree to the peace plan put forward by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan that proposed holding simultaneous referendums on the two sides.

Commenting on Denktash's idea for seeking a different solution outside the UN framework, Chrisostomides dismissed it as an attempt to "downgrade the presence of the Republic of Cyprus and upgrade his own regime."

"There is no possibility for something like that to work because the Republic of Cyprus is there, is entering the European Union and is signing the Accession Treaty on April 16, and after that date efforts to solve the Cyprus problem will continue," he said.

(Xinhua News Agency March 31, 2003)