Education Minister Athena Michaelidou on Sunday called for “intensified” efforts to resolve the Cyprus problem.

“Given the ongoing illegal Turkish occupation of our homeland for over 50 years, we must intensify our fight for the liberation and reunification of our homeland. Focusing our side’s efforts on the diplomatic path and peaceful dialogue, our primary goal is to achieve a just, functional, and sustainable solution,” she said.

She added that such a solution must be “based on the United Nations’ resolutions on Cyprus, the principles of international law, and the European Union’s acquis Communautaire”.

She was speaking at a memorial held for Stelios Masinis, a high-ranking national guardsman who was killed by a landmine during a mine-clearing operation near the Nicosia district village of Potamia in 1999.

Of Masinis, she said his family has “the right to feel proud, since, as the course of his life and his heroic death proved, he demonstrated excessive patriotism, faith, and respect for national ideals, ethos, determination, and altruism”.

“For these reasons, all of us, his compatriots, feel proud, harbouring special gratitude towards him and others like him, since thanks to their heroism, Cyprus was kept upright and alive in critical and difficult periods,” she said.

She added, “we must make their example a source of inspiration and a beacon of light for our own path and the fights we are called to fight, in terms of addressing the ongoing challenges, preserving the memory of our occupied homeland, and asserting the inalienable rights of our people”.