Enlarged Cyprus problem meeting ends with more meetings planned

The second enlarged meeting on the Cyprus problem to be held this year drew to a close on Thursday evening, with United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres swiftly announcing that further such meetings will take place in the coming months.

Firstly, he said, he will hold a meeting with President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar in New York during the “high-level week”, the week in which the 80th session of the UN general assembly is to be held.

This year, the general assembly is scheduled to begin on September 9.

In addition, he said a further enlarged meeting, in the style of this week’s meeting, attended by representatives of the island’s two sides, its three guarantor powers, Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, and the UN, will take place “later this year”.

However, it is not yet clear whether that meeting will take place before or after the Turkish Cypriot leadership election, which is set to take place on October 19.

Guterres described Thursday’s discussions as “constructive” and highlighted that progress has been achieved on four of the six initiatives agreed at the previous enlarged meeting on the Cyprus problem, which was held in Geneva in March.

However, the two major initiatives agreed upon in March, those being the opening of four new crossing points between the island’s two sides and the creation of a solar farm in the buffer zone, saw no progress in the intervening four months.

Guterres was asked about the matter of crossing points after the conclusion of the meeting, and said the locations of the crossing points have been agreed upon

“We have reached an agreement on the crossing points themselves. There is the question of an itinerary in relation to one of them that will be further discussed now, but there was important progress in this regard,” he said.

He was then pressed on what needs to be done to ensure the opening of a crossing point, but did not go into further detail.

However, as Guterres was making his statements, Turkish Cypriot diplomatic sources were denying to the Cyprus Mail that any agreement had been reached on the crossing points’ location.

“There has been no progress yet on the issue of the crossing points because the Greek Cypriot leader [President Nikos Christodoulides] insists on a transit corridor for use only by Greek Cypriots, instead of a crossing point,” one source said.

By “transit corridor”, the sources were referring to crossing points which would run from one part of the Republic to another, through the north, with two such crossing points – through the Turkish Cypriot exclave of Kokkina in the island’s northwest, and between Athienou and the Nicosia suburb of Aglandjia – having been suggested by the Greek Cypriot side at previous meetings.

More to follow…