Espen Barth Eide, the UN Secretary General’s Special Advisor for Cyprus, said that Wednesday’s meeting between the two community leaders will be “crucial” as they will have to agree on the next steps ahead.
President Nicos Anastasiades and Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci met on January 26 and decided to hold a new meeting on February 1, to determine the procedure and methodology to be followed in the ongoing UN-backed negotiations, as several stumbling blocks have been revealed following the multiple meetings in Switzerland.
The main issues discussed are security and guarantees, a crucial chapter in discussions for a Cyprus settlement, while the issue of a rotating presidency in a new federal Cyprus is as yet to be determined.
Eide said after meeting Anastasiades on Tuesday that “tomorrow it will be a crucial meeting between the leaders because we need to see how we use these coming days optimally in order to prepare for a return to the international format.”
Referring to the Conference on Cyprus in Geneva on January 12, he said that there was an agreement at the opening session and that in parallel all outstanding issues will be discussed in Cyprus. “How much time it will take and which order, that is something that the leaders will come to some kind of agreement tomorrow,” he said, adding that now every chapter is open.
Asked if he sees any problems to move forward to a second Conference on Cyprus, Eide said that “the agreement is that we will reconvene when the time is ripe and when that is agreed between the leaders and the other participants of the conference.”
“I would not say that it is a problem,” but “we need a better understanding of which things need to be done here in order to be able to successfully reconvene, because you can always have a meeting but the purpose of the next meeting should be that we conclude something.”
Eide denied that the Conference on Cyprus was not convened at the proper time, adding that “it was important to get to the stage that we could open the international conference.”
He recalled that the conference is open ended, saying that “sometimes I got the impression that some people thought that it was possible to solve these most difficult issues of the Cyprus problem in two days. Of course not.”
The UN official pointed out that the conference decided to set down a high level technical working group, which met the week after, and which, as he said, “was fully successful in the sense that it did exactly what it was asked to do, which was to agree on what the questions are and to agree on the list of instruments by which to deal with these questions.”
Eide pointed out that the Conference on Cyprus had to be convened “because without it we could not open the sixth chapter” on security and guarantees.
“For the leaders and myself Cyprus is the question, but for Turkey and Greece for instance there are many other issues on the agenda and these will influence the way they think about the Cyprus question as well. So we need to be aware of this bigger picture while we need to focus on the need to solve the Cyprus problem,” he said.
Eide explained that “while the guarantor powers see a bigger game they also see the settlement of the Cyprus problem as positive for their bigger questions. So I know there is a convergence that solving the problem will be a good thing.”
