Daily Times

The United Nations will a host a meeting between rival Cypriot leaders next Friday to try to move closer to a relaunch of reunification talks that collapsed 15 months ago.

President Nicos Anastasiades will meet Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci in the UN protected area of the divided capital Nicosia, the government said on Friday.

The meeting, to be hosted by UN special representative Elizabeth Spehar, will seek to create momentum for a new push to end the island’s more than four-decade division.

UN chief Antonio Guterres reported to the Security Council on Monday that prospects for a Cyprus settlement remain alive, despite the collapse of what had been billed as a make-or-break UN-backed peace conference in Switzerland in July 2017.

He said he had instructed his envoys to press efforts to kick-start talks.

Anastasiades underlined last week that his meeting with Akinci was not a signal that peace talks were resuming, just an opportunity to exchange views.

So far there have been no official meetings between the two sides since last year’s abortive conference, just an informal dinner in April at which the two leaders agreed to disagree.

The United Nations has made clear it will not fully engage in a new peace process unless the two leaders commit themselves to entering negotiations in a spirit of compromise.

Cyprus has been divided along ethnic lines since 1974 when Turkish troops invaded and occupied its northern third in response to a coup sponsored by the military junta then in power in Athens seeking to unite the island with Greece.

The two sides are in broad agreement on reunification as a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation. But they remain far apart on future security arrangements, the issue which triggered the collapse of the Swiss peace conference. The Greek Cypriot leadership is deeply opposed to Turkey retaining any long-term troop presence on the island or the right to intervene to safeguard Turkish Cypriot interests.

Published in Daily Times, October 20^th 2018.