The Greek Cypriot side will try so that the tripartite meeting convened by the UN Secretary General on October 15, in New York, will ‘yield the best possible result’, Greek Cypriot negotiator for the Cyprus issue, Menelaos Menelaou, said on Saturday.
‘What is needed is to ensure that this effort that has begun will continue, that gradually we will be able to build to expand the necessary space that must be created to get to the point to have a revitalised process’, Menelaou said, in his speech at AKEL’s conference on 50 years of Cyprus problem.
Asked whether the UN Secretary-General would propose anything during the October 15 tripartite meeting between Cyprus President, Nikos Christodoulides, and Turkish Cypriot leader, Ersin Tatar, Menelaou said the UN Secretary-General ‘never convenes meetings at his own level, just out of courtesy’, adding that the Secretary General ‘will seek to have, through this meeting, some result’.
‘And we have conveyed to the UN that we consider that, at this stage, it is necess
ary to make an evaluation of this first phase of the contacts carried out by the personal envoy of the UN Secretary General and to decide on the next steps’, he said, referring to Maria Angela Holguin. ‘It is important, since such meetings are held, that they have a result’.
Menelaou said that also ‘from the point of view of the United Nations’, the feeling the Greek Cypriot side gets from its contacts with the UN, ‘is that we are faced with a difficult environment.’
At the moment, he added, we are faced with conditions where one of the two sides officially states the position that ‘it does not accept the historical compromise, the agreed basis’.
Menelaou said that ‘our engagement with the personal envoy of the UN Secretary-General was not procedural, but substantive and in line with the position of preserving the acquis with all that it entails – the settlement basis, the convergences, the six points of UN Secretary General’, and added that ‘we’ve made an effort in this direction with the Turkish side as
well’.
‘It is a fact that the response was zero’, he noted.
“We made an effort beyond the essence – the issues of sovereign equality, clarifying how we continue from where we left off and other aspects that have to do with proposals that were submitted from time to time and included ideas for trade, the return of Varosha, the implementation of Turkey’s obligations – where again the response was zero’, he added.
Referring to the broader geopolitical environment, Menelaou said that this must serve as a reminder of the need to multiply efforts while at the same time being pragmatic, to find the next, tangible steps in the direction of revitalising the political process and, by extension, the prospect of achieving a solution to the Cyprus problem.
‘There are no frozen conflicts’, Menelaou said, noting that there is no stability, security, or long-term peace when a conflict remains open, adding that, it will keep ‘festering’ in a way that it could lead to great threats, including the risk of a generalised war.
Cyprus has been divided since 1974, when Turkey invaded and occupied its northern third. Repeated rounds of UN-led peace talks have so far failed to yield results. The latest round of negotiations, in July 2017 at the Swiss resort of Crans-Montana ended inconclusively. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres appointed last January María Ángela Holguín Cuéllar of Colombia as his personal envoy for Cyprus, to assume a Good Offices role on his behalf and search for common ground on the way forward in the Cyprus issue.
Source: Cyprus News Agency