Aug. 4 () –
Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides has accepted an invitation from UN Secretary-General António Guterres to attend a tripartite meeting with Turkish Cypriot leader Ersin Tatar in New York in a week and a half in an attempt to resolve the issue of the island’s historic division, although his counterpart has yet to comment on the matter.
The meeting on August 13 is intended to restart talks to resolve the decades-old Cyprus problem, Christodoulides announced in a speech delivered on Saturday evening and reported by the ‘Cyprus Mail’.
Cyprus has been divided in two since 1974, when the Turkish army occupied the northern part – 36.2 percent of its territory – following a coup instigated by the military junta in power in Greece and fearing that the island would join Greece. In 1983, the Turkish Cypriots proclaimed the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognized only by Ankara, which maintains some 35,000 soldiers there.
The United Nations is acting as guarantor in the area separating the two territories, while trying to bring the parties closer together in order to achieve reunification. However, all attempts made so far have ended in failure, despite the commitment of both sides to continue moving forward in this direction.
“This path has only one direction, because no solution is a solution, because we do not make concessions to division, because we know very well who benefits from the passage of time and stagnation. My main concern is the end of the occupation, the liberation and reunification of our country,” said the president.
“We hope that this time there will be a positive response from Mr Tatar,” added the spokesman for the Cypriot government, Konstantinos Letymbiotis, “and that the meeting will take place on 13 August, which will allow us to continue moving forward and evolving towards the resumption of negotiations, always within the agreed framework.”
Numerous UN-led efforts over the decades to reunify the eastern Mediterranean nation on the basis of a bizonal federation have failed. The most recent effort came in 2021, when officials from Turkey, Greece and the United Kingdom — guarantor powers under a deal that ended British colonial rule in Cyprus — joined top Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot politicians in Geneva for three days of talks.
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