Our View: There is no point in Guterres appointing a new envoy at present

The new UN Special Representative, Colin Stewart, took a tour of the buffer zone on Wednesday and on Friday will have separate meetings with the two leaders. Anastasiades and Tatar also responded positively to an invitation to a reception next week on the occasion of Stewart’s arrival. Once these formalities are over, Stewart is expected to return to Canada briefly, before arriving and taking up his duties.

Will he have anything to do considering the two sides are entrenched in their mutually exclusive positions? The Special Representative is also the head of Unficyp so there will be something to do as long as the peacekeeping force remains; there are also the technical committees, which are involved in some activity. As regards the talks process, it has been put on ice for the time being, with nobody able to predict when it might resume.

This is probably the reason UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has avoided appointing an envoy – either personal or special – to replace Jane Holl Lute, despite indicating to President Anastasiades, when they met in September, that he would do so in a week or two. Three months later, no envoy has been appointed, and it is not difficult to understand why. Guterres, justifiably, believes it would be a waste of UN time and money, given the chasm separating the two sides.

The last special envoy, Lute, came and went on several occasions over two years and achieved nothing, other than secure agreement to an ‘informal’ five-party meeting abroad that proved a spectacular failure. It was not because of any professional deficiencies that her efforts were unsuccessful, but because the two sides could not agree on the basics – the type of settlement they would negotiate. Why would another envoy be appointed when he or she would be certain to achieve nothing?

Perhaps the UN has decided to wait for the presidential elections of 2023, before it makes a move. Anastasiades has not exactly proved pro-settlement and the UN may have opted to wait for the election of the next president before it makes one final effort. There is a similarity to the way the European Commission had dealt with the late Demetris Christofias in 2012. Having realised there was no way it could reach a bailout deal with him, it gave trying, and waiting for the election of a new president in February 2013.

The UNSG may have adopted the same reasoning, even though there is a significant difference. Even if a pro-settlement president is elected, it does not mean that the Turkish Cypriots will agree to the resumption of talks without demanding the recognition of the regime’s sovereignty first.