Efforts being made to bring about the resumption of talks on the Cyprus problem are being undertaken so as to “transform Cyprus into a normal, modern, European state”, government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis said on Sunday, speaking for the first time after arriving in New York ahead of the United Nations’ “high-level week”.
This state, he said, will be “free from anachronistic guarantees and occupying armies” and “continue to demonstrate its great significance and value within the eastern Mediterranean region”.
“The UN high-level week constitutes the year’s premier diplomatic event. Naturally, our presence here focuses on the Cyprus problem and the efforts the president is making to resume substantive negotiations,” he said.
On this front, he said that the planned meeting of President Nikos Christodoulides and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday “is certainly pivotal, standing out among the many bilateral contacts scheduled for this week with heads of state and government, institutional partners, and leading energy giants”.
He said that prior to meeting Guterres, Christodoulides will meet UN Cyprus problem envoy Maria Angela Holguin, with that meeting set to take place on Tuesday evening.
“We approach this process following a period of regular contacts and meetings, as the president has already indicated, he arrives with ideas, proposals, and suggestions regarding confidence-building measures, as well as the methodology and substance of the Cyprus issue,” he said.
To this end, he said that “our goal remains steadfast: to contribute, to the best of our ability, toward making it possible to convene an enlarged meeting, in line with the objective set by the UN secretary-general”.
Guterres had said during his visit to the island in July that an enlarged meeting, involving the island’s two sides, its three guarantor powers, Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, and the UN, will be convened “after adequate progress” is achieved on confidence-building measures, the meeting’s methodology and the substance of the talks.
‘We aim for a successful enlarged meeting’
“We aim for a successful enlarged meeting which will serve as a meaningful springboard for resuming substantive negotiations from the point at which they were interrupted,” Letymbiotis said on Sunday, in reference to the collapse of talks at the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana in 2017.
He then said that Christodoulides’ own address to the UN general assembly on Wednesday will constitute a “key diplomatic moment”, where “we will convey our messages regarding our self-evident effort to transform Cyprus into a normal, modern, European state”.
Asked whether it will be possible for a tripartite meeting involving Christodoulides, either Guterres or Holguin, and Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman to be held in New York, he said that “as of now, there is no prospect” of such a meeting being held.
However, he did say that if Guterres’ schedule should permit such a thing to happen, “we are considering extending our stay in New York specifically to make such a meeting possible”, with the delegation currently scheduled to remain there until next Saturday.
“We will wait to hear from [Holguin] directly,” he said, before saying that a meeting with Guterres would “carry even greater weight, as it would involve a joint review and assessment of the steps taken so far, and, more importantly, the steps which could be taken in the near future”.
On the matter of a document listing the convergences reached in talks on the Cyprus problem up to now, which Christodoulides had earlier said was being prepared, he said that “this is something upon which we, too, are waiting to be briefed by Holguin”.
“It is known that the UN has been compiling this record. We had expected this update during Holguin’s scheduled visit to Cyprus in September, which was postponed for personal reasons. It is a matter which will be part of the discussion, taking place next Tuesday,” he said.
Christodoulides, Erhurman have met three times since July
Christodoulides and Erhurman have met on three separate occasions since Guterres’ visit to the island, but no concrete progress has been achieved in that time, with the sides still in open disagreement over the meaning of political equality, crossing points, and the methodology of the talks.
In addition, throughout the summer, initiatives had been taken by the Greek Cypriot side to cancel international events being held by the Turkish Cypriot community, including a children’s football camp organised by FC Barcelona and a music festival in Kyrenia.
This prompted Erhurman to warn that such initiatives “undermine trust” between thw island’s two sides, stressing last week that “if we wish to move the process forward, it is crucial to create the ‘conducive climate’ mentioned by Guterres”.
Nonetheless, this week, Erhurman said that Guterres demanded that progress be made on seven separate topics on the Cyprus problem, and declared that the Turkish Cypriot side is ready to make progress on all seven.
Those seven topics, he said, are the issues of crossing points, mine clearance, the citizenship of children born of “mixed marriages”, sports, joint disaster response, and a joint mechanism to combat irregular migration.
He then confirmed that he will meet Guterres in New York next week, before emphasising that he remains set against the idea of holding an enlarged meeting on the Cyprus problem “which would yield no results”.
“We have no right to subject Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots to what we experienced at the 2004 Annan plan referendum and in Crans-Montana in 2017. The secretary-general also came to our point of view, making it clear that he would not convene a fruitless five-plus-one meeting,” he said.
Such a meeting, he said, will not take place “without progress on confidence-building measures, methodology and substantive issues”, with “five-plus-one” another term used to describe an enlarged meeting.
Asked whether he remains hopeful that progress can be made, he said, “I said I am hopeful and I stand by this statement”.
“My hope is not because I get along very well with Christodoulides or because we have become very close. We have made contacts in ten and a half months which could not be made in the five years before. We are able to talk,” he said.
He added that after he was elected last October, “Christodoulides had said, ‘let’s start off from where we left off in Crans-Montana’, but we explained that there has been an erosion of trust for nine years, and that confidence-building measures should come first, followed by methodology, and finally, negotiations”.
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