NICOSIA, Dec 16 (AFP) - Cyprus President Tassos Papadopoulos said Thursday he was ready for a hard fight right up to the wire at the Brussels summit where EU leaders will decide whether to give Turkey a date for accession talks.
Before leaving for the crucial summit, Papadopoulos told reporters he was "prepared for tough negotiations up until the last moment".
He said "unforeseen factors" plus the positions of the other 24 EU member states still left the summit outcome uncertain, while Cyprus retained the option of using its veto if Ankara refused to budge on the recognition issue.
"We will do everything that we think is right for Cyprus and judged to be in the medium- and long-term interests of the Cypriot people," Papadopoulos said, playing his cards close to his chest.
"Surely you can't expect me to say if in this specific instance conditions are ripe to exercise (the veto) or not," he added.
Papadopoulos believes there will be a battle of wills between the "big countries" which want Turkey to receive a talks date without conditions and other members which want Ankara to comply with certain demands.
For the divided island of Cyprus, the summit would be "a major turning-point, but we are not calling it an issue of life or death", he said.
The EU expects Turkey to give implicit recognition of Cyprus' internationally-backed government in return for an accord this week to open accession talks, a Dutch EU presidency source said Wednesday.
He said that Turkey would have to show a commitment to sign an additional protocol to a 1963 accord with the EU's forerunner, called the Ankara Agreement, to cover the bloc's 10 new member states including Cyprus.
According to state radio, the Cyprus delegation is looking for a "cast-iron" commitment from Ankara it will sign the EU customs agreement, if it does not do so before the summit ends on Friday.
Cyprus has been divided along ethnic lines since 1974, when Turkish troops occupied the northern third of the island in response to a coup engineered by the then-ruling military junta in Athens to unite the country with Greece.
Only the Greek Cypriot south of the island joined the European Union on May 1, after Greek Cypriots rejected a UN blueprint to reunify Cyprus.
Turkey alone recognises the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus declared in 1983, whose voters overwhelmingly backed the peace plan in separate referendums.
Ahead of Thursday's EU summit, Greek Cypriot government officials have said they want Turkey to at least show willingness to normalize ties as the price for Cyprus's agreement for the bloc to launch accession talks with Ankara.
Turkey has so far rejected extra conditions such as recognition of Cyprus in return for winning its long-sought date for EU entry talks.
12/16/2004 11:20 GMT - AFP