President Nikos Christodoulides on Sunday rejected a call by the United Nations secretary-general’s personal envoy, María Ángela Holguín, to put efforts to restart Cyprus talks on hold until July, saying he was ready to meet as early as next week.
Holguín made the call in an op-ed in which she argued that the Cyprus EU Council Presidency, the May parliamentary elections and the need to give the new Turkish Cypriot leader time to settle in all made the coming months unsuitable for a resumption of negotiations.
Christodoulides, who said he had not yet read the article when he spoke to reporters at midday, dismissed those arguments outright.
“I am ready next week for us to meet in an expanded conference, as we promised the Secretary-General in New York, and to announce the resumption of talks from where they left off at Crans-Montana, with full respect for the negotiating acquis. Let us all prove in practice that we are ready. Let us leave the statements behind,” he said.
Neither the EU Council Presidency nor the May elections affect the timeline in any way, Christodoulides stressed. Asked how those factors could make a resumption impossible, he responded: “How do they make it impossible when I am telling you I am ready next week to go” to an expanded meeting?
The president called the elections argument “laughable”, adding that the electoral process had absolutely no bearing on negotiations.
Christodoulides added that if there was willingness on both the Turkish and Turkish Cypriot sides, talks could move forward.
In her op-ed, Holguín seized on the two leaders’ agreement to speak directly without UN mediation and suggested it was time to build “a different model of interaction, one in which decisions help demonstrate a genuine interest in resuming negotiations”.
She signalled that she did not intend to return to the island for months, writing: “I will return to the island in a few months, when I see that I can contribute to a specific step forward and the leaders consider that the UN’s presence is useful to facilitate decision-making.”
She wrote that the Republic of Cyprus’s assumption of the EU Council Presidency “will keep the government very busy coordinating the different issues and meetings that are routinely held in the EU”. The approaching May elections, she added, were “creating a political moment that ends up limiting the possibility of significant changes”.
“In the north, the arrival of a new leader with a different vision, who must coordinate both the internal team in charge of governance and its strong relationship with Türkiye, managing positions and priorities, also makes the upcoming months a complicated period to achieve major changes in the dialogue process,” Holguín wrote.
She added that both leaders needed time and should “continue meeting to make small joint decisions, and to explore ideas and viable pathways to restart a more formal negotiation process in the best possible way, beginning in July”.
Holguín has also adopted a pattern of convening Cyprus-related meetings outside the island, apparently to avoid visits to Cyprus and face-to-face meetings with the two leaders. She said she would bring together the co-chairs of the bi-communal technical committees in London next week and expressed hope of organising more such meetings in future.
Her move is not considered unrelated to the recent trip by Turkish Cypriot leader Erhürman to New York, where he met the UN Secretary-General.
Separately, Turkish presidency sources told the Cyprus News Agency that the critical question was “whether there is willingness to meet on the basis of the sovereign equality of the two sides”. The sources said the main issue was not whether Turkey would react but whether the Greek Cypriot side was prepared to accept a formula based on sovereign equality. They added that they did not believe a positive answer to that question could easily be given.