President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman meet the UN Secretary-General’s personal envoy, Maria Angela Holguin, on Monday for talks seen as decisive for the next steps on the Cyprus problem, after she warned that without a result there will be no expanded 5+1 meeting.
The meeting is expected to show whether Erhurman is ready to accept a package of confidence-building measures, which will decide the prospects of a deal. Its outcome will also determine whether a wider meeting in the 5+1 format can take place, opening the way to substantive negotiations.
In interviews over the weekend, Holguin sent a series of messages to both leaders, warning that failure to produce a result on Monday would be a missed opportunity.
Warning over 5+1
Speaking to the Turkish Cypriot newspaper ‘Yeni Duzen’, Holguin said a package of confidence-building measures was being prepared for Monday’s trilateral meeting but was not yet ready, and that this depended on the leaders.
“If there is no result, there will be no 5+1 meeting,” she said, explaining that a successful 5+1 was very important to the Secretary-General and that a bad meeting could further complicate matters between the two leaders.
Talks between the leaders had produced positive results that must now be set down in a text, she said, adding that efforts were focused on creating the conditions for negotiations and that confidence-building measures were the first step.
If nothing emerges on Monday, she said, she will write her report to the Secretary-General, as her term ends in December, and he will explain the state of the Cyprus problem to his successor. She nevertheless said she was optimistic about the confidence-building measures, while noting that the political deadlocks between the two sides were not expected to be lifted on Monday.
Asked about the Secretary-General’s seven points, which Erhurman cites, Holguin said they were proposals by the leaders. She referred to the 2025 meeting in Geneva, where four crossing points, solar panels in the buffer zone and the Bicommunal Youth Committee were raised, and said the Secretary-General had reminded them of those seven points. Asked about the 19-point package from Christodoulides, she said it was not in their hands.
On the timing of Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan’s visit to the island, she said she honestly did not know how to interpret it, noting that there were also elections.
Risk of failure
Holguin told the ‘Sunday Mail’ that another failure of the Secretary-General’s initiative would do huge damage to the effort to restart negotiations and have serious consequences for the prospects of a solution. She described the current initiative as a significant opportunity to restart the process, saying its loss would make efforts harder.
The Secretary-General did not want to hold a 5+1 meeting without good preparation, she said, because there was a sense that each failed meeting had further widened the differences between the two sides, and this time things had to be different.
As a possible way out of the deadlock over the rotating presidency, she suggested that negotiations begin without preconditions but with that issue first on the agenda. That would establish from the outset whether agreement was possible, she said, rather than spending months in talks before addressing one of the main points of disagreement.
Process and agenda
In an interview with the newspaper ‘Politis’, Holguin said the two leaders must agree on a clear process before substantive negotiations begin, with a specific timetable, an agreed agenda and mechanisms to overcome any deadlocks.
She said the six points presented by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at Crans-Montana could form the basis of the agenda. “The perfect agenda is the six points. Call it what you want,” she said.
