by Apostolis Zoupaniotis
United Nations, (CNA) — Italian President of the UN Security Council Marcello Spatafora has expressed the Council’s regret that there has been no really further progress in the implementation of the 8 July 2006 Agreement, and support to the Secretary General’s assessment that political will is needed to go beyond the procedural points and to begin getting into the substance of the negotiations.
In a statement here, Spatafora said that UNSG’s Special Representative for Cyprus Michael Moller briefed the members of the Council on the Report of the Secretary General for the renewal of the mandate of the UN peace-keeping force in Cyprus, ”where we stand in the implementation of the 8 July Agreement and also in the running up to the elections in February in Cyprus and on the successive procedural discussions”.
”We expressed disappointment and regret that there has been no really further progress in the implementation of the Agreement, in the preparation of the negotiation and so on,” he stressed.
He noted that ”we fully endorsed and supported what the Secretary General’s assessment was; that what we need now in the following weeks and months, is political good will, flexibility and courage to go further, to go beyond the procedural points and to begin getting into the substance of the negotiations provided of course that we have a proper and appropriate framework and that their homework has been done properly.”
”I mean, if you want the substance, then there are some technical questions and answers. In the Report of the Secretary General that of course is at your disposal, you see there are more shadows than lights. So we hope that in this, we are strengthening once more, the hand, the position of the Secretary General and of his Special Representative, encouraging the parties to engage in the process described before. So this is what the discussion was,” he added.
Responding to a question on the so called isolation of the Turkish Cypriot community, Spatafora said they are ”just encouraging overcoming all those factors that bring the isolation because what we need is the interaction.”
On July 8 2006, Cyprus President Tassos Papadopoulos and Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat in the presence of the then UN Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs Ibrahim Gambari signed an agreement, involving bicommunal discussions by technical committees of issues affecting the day-to-day life of the people and, concurrently, consideration by expert working groups of substantive issues of the Cyprus problem.
