Sharing Lessons from Nicosia at the Forum of Cities in Transition: from the left Padraig O'Malley (University of Massachusetts), Lellos Demetriades, Allan Leonard (Northern Ireland Foundation) and Mustafa Akinci. Photo courtesy of Allan Leonard.
The landslide victory of Mustafa Akinci with a 60.3 percent of the vote brought renewed hopes for the settlement of the Cyprus problem. Rightly so, but to be successful both leaderships in Cyprus should avoid the mistakes of past failures to reunify Cyprus.
Akinci is widely known for serving as the mayor of the Turkish Cypriot sector of divided Nicosia. In the early 1980s, him and Lellos Demetriades resorted to an ad hoc set of arrangements to address the city’s impending environmental disaster in the absence of a sewer system.
