Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides will have a meeting with Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman at 3:30 p.m. today at the United Nations Good Offices Mission offices at the former Nicosia airport, inside the U.N.-controlled buffer zone.
‘We are working to turn the window of opportunity on the Cyprus issue into a resumption of negotiations,’ President Nikos Christodoulides said Monday after meeting with the mayor of Morphou at the Presidential Palace.
‘I believe there is a window of opportunity that we continue to work to turn into concrete developments. And there is only one such development: the resumption of talks from where they left off in 2017,’ the president said.
Referring to today’s meeting with the Turkish Cypriot leader, Christodoulides said it was arranged ‘at our initiative, to discuss in more concrete terms how we can achieve this goal.’
He also said the U.N. had completed the document on the convergences, ‘which will form the basis for the resumption of negotiations,’ describing this as a positive development.
Regarding the 19-point proposal he submitted to the Turkish Cypriot leader at their last meeting, Christodoulides stressed that it contained new, highly specific proposals that differed from those submitted in the past, which had not received a positive response from the Turkish side.
‘So we are not hiding behind positions that we know have already been rejected. We came forward with new proposals and new ideas on methodology, substance and confidence-building measures, and I am pleased that they were positively received by the UN. This was the approach taken by the UN Secretary-General in New York,’ he said.
The president reiterated that there is a window of opportunity with the current U.N. secretary-general that, as he has conveyed to them, he would like to fully seize.
‘We hope to achieve this within that period. At the same time, we are in contact with the candidates for the next UN Secretary-General,’ he said.
Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkey invaded and occupied its northern third. Repeated rounds of UN-led peace talks have so far failed to yield results due to Turkish intransigence. The latest round of negotiations, in July 2017 at the Swiss resort of Crans-Montana ended inconclusively.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, whose term nears its end, announced he would convene another meeting in broader format, after adequate preparation, but gave no timeline. He secured to that end the consensus of both sides and of the guarantor powers. María Angela Holguín, Guterres’ Personal Envoy on Cyprus, is tasked to engage with the parties. Executive Vice-President Raffaele Fitto acts as the European Commission’s Special Representative for Cyprus, succeeding EU special envoy Johannes Hahn.