President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader, Ersin Tatar, will have nothing constructive to tell each other when they meet in the presence of the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Saturday. That the UNSG has agreed to see them, for 15-20 minutes, during the busiest time of the year for him – the annual UN General Assembly – should keep them happy as both see the meeting as a good publicity exercise for their respective, domestic audiences. Neither is seeking anything that would threaten the status quo, despite what they might say in public.

For Tatar, the meeting is important because he has elections next month and wants to show voters that he is defending his community’s interests at the UN by not budging from his position on the two-state solution. For Christodoulides, the meeting is part of the theatre about his commitment to the resumption of talks which he has been promoting at home and abroad even though he has no interest in it. It helps that Tatar has no intention of calling Christodoulides’ bluff as this ensures the status quo is safe and each side is free to go its separate way.

Even the speeches at the UN General Assembly have become more confrontational, more like they were in the years immediately after the 1974 invasion. President Tayyip Erdogan set the tone with his speech on Tuesday when he said, “I call on the international community to recognise the TRNC and develop diplomatic, political and economic relations with it.” It was the fourth year running, he had urged the General Assembly to recognise the ‘TRNC’, he said, because “the solution of the Cyprus problem could not be based on the federal model which has been tried many times but failed because of the intransigent stance of the Greek Cypriot side.”

The reference to Cyprus was just a small part of Erdogan’s speech which was dominated by what was happening in Gaza. Christodoulides also allocated a small part of his speech on Wednesday to the Cyprus problem but went on the offensive, recalling the pain and suffering, the rape of women by the invading army’s soldiers in 1974, the missing and displacement of tens of thousands of people. This was the post-1974 discourse, but 51 years after the invasion it did not sound like the discourse of someone looking to the future, someone who was trying to convince the other side to return to the negotiating table so that a settlement could be agreed.

The president also attacked Erdogan for his “selective sensitivity and hypocrisy of the highest form.” He “preached the world on peace and accountability, he pointed the finger to others for crimes Turkey itself commits every day,” said President Christodoulides, who was untypically aggressive, highlighting Erdogan’s double standards in relation to what he had said against Israel in his general assembly address, rather than anything he mentioned regarding Cyprus. It was a bizarre response by the president, but perfectly consistent with the objective of maintaining the status quo, an objective both sides work for with the full assistance of the UN.