President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman will meet on Tuesday, government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis said on Monday, with the meeting the latest of ongoing weekly discussions being held by the pair.
“Our goal remains to achieve substantive progress in the effort to resume negotiations from the point at which they were interrupted, within the agreed-upon framework,” Letymbiotis said.
He added that “we approach this with the same constructive spirit, consistency, and concrete proposals, in the conviction that, through substantial dialogue, the conditions for the next steps can be created”.
The meeting will come just three days after the two leaders jointly attended a bicommunal festival in the Larnaca district village of Pyla, with Christodoulides saying of their presence at the festival that “we are sending a message of peace”.
“We are sending a message of … coexistence and a message regarding the need to finally reunify our homeland. I reiterate what I said in a recent interview with the Turkish Cypriot press: if it were up to the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots, out homeland would certainly be reunified,” he said.
However, the two leaders’ positions remain considerably apart on a range of issues, including political equality in a post-solution Cyprus, with Christodoulides on Sunday accusing Erhurman of “setting preconditions” in the latter’s insistence on a rotating presidency between the two communities should a solution be found.
“It is clear that the Turkish side … is setting terms and preconditions for the resumption of talks. They are demanding that we accept, in advance, specific positions of interest to the Turkish Cypriot community, while showing absolutely no willingness to discuss or accept our own positions on other significant aspects of the Cyprus problem,” he said.
The rotating presidency is viewed by the Turkish Cypriot side as being fundamental to the political equality between Cyprus’ two major communities which is stipulated by United Nations resolutions.
Dana: Rotating presidency an indispensable component of political equality
Erhurman’s undersecretary Mehmet Dana had told the Cyprus Mail that it is an “indispensable component” of political equality, saying that “political equality forms the foundation of a structure requiring the joint exercise of a limited number of specific powers, shared competences, and this is not open to negotiation”.
Disagreements also remain over the question of what the pair should be discussing at their meetings, with Christodoulides having put forward 19 new points for discussion at a meeting last month.
The substance of those 19 points has not been publicly disclosed, though Erhurman has described them as “throwing a spanner in the works”.
He said he believes the discussions should be based on he “seven proposals for confidence-building measures which [United Nations Secretary-General Antonio] Guterres voiced on the island at the end of July”.
Those seven issues were crossing points, mine clearance, the citizenship of children born of mixed marriages, sports, joint disaster response and a joint mechanism to combat irregular migration.
Meanwhile, UN envoy Maria Angela Holguin is expected to return to the island before the end of this month, and she said on Saturday that confidence-building measures across Cyprus’ divide “need to be implemented” so as to “create trust and demonstrate with facts the actual political will” for rapprochement.
“If, over the past two years, the parties have been unable to agree on a crossing point to facilitate communication, demining, or a joint effort to eliminate plastic pollution across the island … how can they agree on a political, economic and social model capable of overcoming decades of division and growing distance between the two communities?” she asked, while speaking to newspaper Politis.