To begin a new Cyprus peace process, the old one must be long dead and buried, kaput, unsalvageable, consigned to the deep freeze until the stars are aligned once again.

Some think that time is 2024, whether that’s down to real hope for progress, or a chance to finally kill off this international headache and cement partition, remains to be seen. 

The last significant process died in Crans-Montana, Switzerland in 2017 and the futile attempt to resuscitate it in Geneva in April 2021 with the same players, only served to catapult the Cyprob deeper into the political wilderness for seven more years.

The Greek Cypriots wanted to go back in time to pick up from where things stopped in 2017. The Turkish side had moved on, claiming a two-state solution was now the only way forward. This does not bode well for new negotiations. At least in the past both sides pretended to be on the same page.

The two prior Cyprob processes, at least for long-time observers, were marked by some semblance of excitement and hope at the start, however misplaced they proved to be in the long term.

Even the start of talks in 2008 between Demetris Christofias and Mehmet Ali Talat, although they could both be described as “milk-toast” rather than dynamic leaders, proffered some semblance of hope.

Both moderates, both pro-solution, both apparently sincere but both also plodders. Sometimes slow and steady can win the race but to coin a now-infamous phrase which belies that: “This is Cyprus”.

They did succeed in opening the Ledra Street crossing almost immediately after talks began, plus they were instrumental in setting up the technical committees that sort of still work, ploddingly, but the pair accomplished little else over the following two years except to produce background noise.

Overlapping leaderships and mismatched interlocuters are never a good recipe when it comes to the Cyprob. When Talat was ousted in 2010 he was replaced by hardliner Dervis Eroglu for the last three years of Christofias’ presidency.

When Christofias bowed out in 2013 opening the way for Nicos Anastasaides, the latter inherited Eroglu, and a process that was already long dead.

• Partition step by step

It was only when Mustafa Akinci, a pro-solution long-time Turkish Cypriot peacenik was elected in 2015 that a new impetus was given to the process. The stars were aligned again. Their initial rapport and efforts appeared to bear this out for a long time and offered the greatest prospects for a solution since the Annan plan in 2004.

But like Burgenstock in 2004 they also ultimately crashed and burned in Crans-Montana 2017. Perhaps the UN should stop holding Cyprus conferences in Switzerland.

The huge leaps forward Anastasiades and Akinci took in the first two years were only surpassed by the huge leaps backwards their failure sowed in the ensuing years in terms of trust between the two sides. It also created an apathy among the populace, jaded and disappointed time and again.

George Vassiliou: the years of lost opportunities

Akinci was gone in 2020, replaced by another Ankara-backed horse, Ersin Tatar, who in turn inherited Anastasiades who was running down the clock on his presidency.

So what do you get when you cross a hardliner with a consummate equivocator? Not a lot.

Anastasiades said in December 2023, on his way out the door as president, that he had failed to solve Cyprus problem despite his “superhuman” efforts during his ten years in office. No one believed him.

But we’re not here to belabour the past. It’s just context.

In January 2024, the never-say-die ever-optimistic UN, partly influenced by the constant nagging from the Greek Cypriot side for a new envoy, fired up the merry-go-round again. By then we had a shiny new leader on the Greek Cypriot side, President Nikos Christodoulides, and a now new UN envoy Maria Angela Holguin who was given an initial six-month mandate to determine prospects for a new round of negotiations. She has her work cut out for her as she no doubt knew before she took the job and if not, had it brought home to her during her first two rounds of contacts in late January and March.

• Time to think of the future UN envoy says after meeting leaders

Instead of starting from a position of common ground as in all processes going back to 1974 – a bicommunal, bizonal federation – the first hurdle will be to get back onto the same page even before any talks begin. So, instead of starting with a glass half-full, the backdrop to the opening scene is a glass half-empty.

The protagonists do not inspire confidence either. We’ve had plenty of provocative words from Tatar, the instigator of opening the ghost town of Varosha. Early in March, and for the umpteenth time he declared: “No one can stop” the Turkish Cypriots from achieving their own state.

Christodoulides for his part speaks incessantly and spews all the right noises into the ether but he’s carrying some unflattering baggage from his time at the foreign ministry and is seen in some international quarters as hawkish on the Cyprob.

Even as he made the Cyprus issue “his priority” and unilaterally announced measures to benefit the Turkish Cypriots, UN reports showed that behind the scenes, according to Tatar, the “policy of obstruction” against TRNC officials abroad’ by the Cyprus government had reached new heights since Christodoulides’ election. The Turkish side was also upset that as a starter course, Christodoulides spent the first half of the year trying to rope the EU into appointing its own Cyprus envoy. Not that the Turkish side’s gripes about the EU are anything new but the new president must have known Brussels wouldn’t bite on anything we offered outside of UN parameters.  The ‘European solution to the Cyprus problem’ that we were told in 2004 to expect any time now, remains elusive two decades later.

• May 2023: Cyprus proposal for an EU envoy had little traction in Brussels

The two leaders have met twice outside of a negotiation’s process since Christodoulides was elected in February 2023, once at the CMP lab in July and the second time socially at the UN end-of-year reception in December where everyone was in a great mood and it was the season of goodwill but when it comes to the Cyprob, goodwill is either fleeting or missing in action most of the time,

UNSG Antonio Guterres, in his January 2024 report, aside from referring to the “sobering anniversary” marking 60 years of UN involvement in Cyprus, spoke of “continued strained hope” that there could be developments “after many years with no substantive negotiations and low public confidence in prospects for a settlement”.

Guterres said however that it becomes clearer “with every passing year that the divide between the sides is growing, gradually eroding the prospects of finding a mutually acceptable political settlement”.

As things stand at the start of a new process in the same year that Cypriots on both sides of the divide will mark the 1974 Turkish invasion in two very different ways, given the players and their positions, the prospects do not look promising. 

Each time there is a new process the UN calls on the leaders to show courage and tells them this is the last chance. Yet, the UN itself continually facilitates and tolerates the entrenched behaviours of the two sides in Cyprus while bemoaning the 60 years its forces have had to remain on the island. Successive Cypriot leaders keep producing dead horses but it’s the UN that keeps on flogging them.