Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan is expected in the occupied north on Friday for his first visit since Tufan Erhurman became Turkish Cypriot leader more than a year ago, three days before UN envoy Maria Angela Holguin meets the two leaders together on Monday 9 November.
President Nikos Christodoulides said he was optimistic and ready for positive announcements that would pave the way for an enlarged conference aimed at announcing that talks would resume from where they left off.
Fidan will meet Erhurman to discuss recent developments in the Cyprus problem and the current situation, according to Turkish Cypriot press reports that revealed the visit on Wednesday. The reports said it would be Fidan’s first visit since Erhurman won the 2025 ‘elections’, and gave no details of any other meetings he would hold.
Speaking on Wednesday evening, in his first remarks since Fidan’s visit became known, Christodoulides said he had exchanged messages with Holguin and that they had been positive so far. He was awaiting official announcements, he said, and hoped the messages would translate into concrete announcements.
“We are ready, I repeat, to have positive announcements,” he said.
Asked whether anything on Turkey’s side suggested the process was moving forward, he said he did not want to comment on Turkey, noting that Holguin had already referred publicly to messages from Ankara.
Holguin’s shuttle diplomacy
Holguin, the UN Secretary-General’s personal envoy, went to the Presidential Palace straight after visiting Turkey’s ‘embassy’ in the occupied north. There she met Turkey’s ambassador, Ali Murat Basceri, who passed on a message from Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Mehmet Kemal Bozay.
She relayed Ankara’s message to Christodoulides on Tuesday, and on Wednesday visited Erhurman’s office to hear his views.
Asked after Wednesday’s meeting about her visit to the Turkish ‘embassy’, Holguin said she had gone there to receive Ankara’s message. She said she and Erhurman had discussed how work could continue ahead of the leaders’ joint meeting on Monday.
Crossing points
Erhurman said he was ready to discuss everything, starting with the UN map of crossing points. “We are ready to discuss everything,” he told an online programme on the Ozgur website.
He added that his side was consulting fully with Ankara and that there was no problem at all in their dialogue. He noted that no Turkish Cypriot ‘president’ had ever negotiated without coordinating with Turkey, and repeated that this time he wanted negotiations aimed at a solution, not negotiations for their own sake.
Erhurman said he had told people he would not discuss Kokkina because there were four points on the map that had come from New York, and that he was not bringing anything new. Those should be settled first, he said, before the others his side would put forward were discussed.
He listed the four options on the table, based on the New York maps, as Louroujina, Pyroi, Aglandjia and Mia Milia. There were two maps with blue marks and two with red, he said: Athienou and Mia Milia were marked red and the others blue, and Kokkina did not appear on that map.
He said he had argued from his first day in office that, had he been in Ersin Tatar’s position in New York, he was not sure he would have chosen Mia Milia as the second crossing point for vehicles. He might have chosen Kaimakli or Famagusta Gate instead, he said.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s term ends at the end of the year.
