No date set but negotiators’ meeting likely in first week of September

While no date has yet been set, it is likely that a meeting between Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar’s special representative Gunes Onar and Greek Cypriot chief negotiator for the Cyprus problem Menelaos Menelou will take place in the first week of September, the Cyprus Mail understands.

Diplomatic sources told the Cyprus Mail that “nothing has been set” as yet, while the Cyprus News Agency reported that “it has not been confirmed” whether Onar and Menelaou will hold a trilateral meeting with United Nations envoy Maria Angela Holguin.

Holguin is expected to arrive on the island on September 1, with the Cyprus Mail having been informed this week that she will meet both Tatar and President Nikos Christodoulides on September 2.

Those meetings are set to take place ahead of a planned trilateral meeting involving the pair and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in New York during the UN’s “high-level week” in September, “high-level week”, the week in which the 80th session of the UN general assembly is to be held.

This year, the general assembly is scheduled to begin on September 9.

After that meeting, a further enlarged meeting, involving Cyprus’ two sides, the UN, and the island’s three guarantor powers, Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, is set to take place before the end of the year, likely after the Turkish Cypriot leadership election, which is set to take place on October 19.

On Monday, government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis had been asked whether the UN’s new special representative in Cyprus, now all but confirmed to be Senegalese diplomat Khassim Diagne, will be in place before the New York meeting, and said that “this is an issue which concerns the United Nations, but this is the goal”.

“From the very beginning, as the host country, we have agreed to the person who has been proposed, and we await the procedures which have already been initiated by the UN and the official announcements,” he said.

Holguin most recently visited Cyprus last month, holding meetings with both Christodoulides and Tatar ahead of the most recent enlarged meeting on the Cyprus problem in New York.