The President of the Republic, Nicos Christodoulides, will meet with Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhürman today at 3:30 p.m. The meeting will take place at the offices of the United Nations Good Offices Mission, located at Nicosia International Airport within the buffer zone.
“We are working to turn this window of opportunity in the Cyprus issue into a resumption of negotiations,” Nikos Christodoulides said on Monday following a meeting with the Mayor of Morphou at the Presidential Palace.
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“I believe there is a window of opportunity that we continue to work toward so that it can be translated into concrete developments. And there is one such development: the resumption of talks from where they were suspended in 2017,” the President said.
Referring to today’s meeting with the Turkish Cypriot leader, he said it was scheduled “at our own initiative, to discuss in even greater detail how we can achieve this goal.”
The President noted that there are certain developments that he believes are a step in the right direction and can serve as the basis for resuming negotiations.
He also mentioned that the convergence document—“which will form the basis for the resumption of negotiations”—has been finalized by the UN, and this is a positive development.
Regarding the 19-point proposal he submitted to the Turkish Cypriot leader at their last meeting, he emphasized that these are new, very specific, and different from those submitted in the past, which had not received a positive response from the Turkish side.
“So, we are not entrenching ourselves behind positions that we know have already been rejected. We came with new proposals and new ideas regarding methodology, substance, and the Joint Working Groups, and I am pleased that they were well received by the UN. That was the approach taken by the UN Secretary-General in New York,” he noted.
The Turkish Cypriot side’s stance at the last meeting, when these proposals were presented, he added, was that they would be studied. “There was neither approval nor rejection. I hope that tomorrow we will have a substantive dialogue on these new proposals, so that the conditions can be created,” he said.
The President of the Republic reiterated that there is a window of opportunity with the current UN Secretary-General, and as he has conveyed to them, he would like to take full advantage of it.
“We hope this can be achieved within this timeframe. At the same time, we are in contact with the candidates for the new UN Secretary-General,” he said.
Various names are being mentioned, he continued, and there are several processes underway in the Security Council that have not yet yielded a specific result, but efforts are also being made in the direction of the Security Council.
He also emphasized that the nature of the solution does not change when the UN Secretary-General changes. And whoever the new Secretary-General may be, he noted, acts on behalf of the UN Security Council. “He acts on the basis of the mandate given to him by the UN Security Council.”
