United Nations envoy for the Cyprus problem Maria Angela Holguin will travel to both Brussels and Ankara ahead of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ visit to the island next week.
Holguin will meet the European Commission’s newly appointed Cyprus problem envoy Raffaele Fitto in Brussels on Wednesday afternoon, with it having earlier been reported that she will also meet European Council President Antonio Costa.
After leaving Brussels, she will travel to Ankara, where she is expected to meet Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan on Friday.
According to Turkey’s Anka news agency, the meeting is expected to see the pair “assess the recent acceleration of diplomatic contacts on the Cyprus issue, the positions of the sides, and the topics planned to be discussed during Guterres’ visit”.
Guterres will then arrive in Cyprus next Monday. He will hold an informal evening meal with both President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman on Monday evening, before holding separate meetings, first with Christodoulides and then with Erhurman, at their official residences on the Tuesday morning.
Later on Tuesday, he will visit the Committee on Missing Persons, before holding a tripartite meeting with both leaders on Wednesday.
The travels of Holguin and Guterres come with efforts both in Cyprus and abroad ramping up with the aim of bringing about a resumption of negotiations in earnest on the Cyprus problem.
Holguin’s return to the island will, in part, be geared towards efforts to convene an enlarged meeting on the Cyprus problem at some point this summer.
Such a meeting would involve the island’s two sides, its three guarantor powers, Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, and the UN, though both Cypriot leaders have stressed that the meeting is not an end in itself.
Erhurman, for example, used his July 20 anniversary speech on Monday to stress that “we do not want negotiations for the sakeof negotiations, or a five-plus-one meeting for the sake of a five-plus-one meeting”, and that “we want to be result-orientated”.
Earlier, Christodoulides had said that the outcome of an enlarged meeting must entail “the resumption of talks”, but made clear in his own remarks on Monday that, in his view, “everything depends on Turkey”.
Holguin herself went further, calling on Cypriots to “seize this historic opportunity to negotiate a lasting solution” and saying that Guterres is “evaluating which could be the next phases that will convince both parties to take concrete steps towards a final solution”.
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