Rival Cypriot leaders met yesterday for the formal launch of intensive UN-backed negotiations to reunify the divided Mediterranean island after three decades of failed diplomacy.
Both seen as pro-settlement moderates, President Demetris Christofias, a Greek Cypriot, and Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat, have met five times this year in a renewed push for unity.
“Today is an historic day for Cyprus,” said UN chief Ban Ki-moon’s special envoy, former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer, who was at the launch of the talks in the UN-patrolled buffer zone of Nicosia.
PHOTO: AP
Downer said “significant progress” had been made to build confidence and create a solid foundation for the negotiations, which mark the first major push for peace on the island since a failed UN peace plan in 2004.
“There have been difficult moments over the past months and there will likely be further difficulties and challenges ahead. At the same time, the Cyprus problem is not insurmountable and the negotiations which begin today can and must have a successful outcome,” he said.
The negotiation process has an open-ended timeline but the UN has warned that the talks can not go on indefinitely without tangible progress.
The buildup to the talks has been clouded by the refusal of Turkish Cypriot authorities to allow Greek Cypriot pilgrims to travel via a town in the northwest of the island to attend a church service.
However, hundreds of Turkish- and Greek-Cypriot peace activists rallied on Monday night in the capital’s buffer zone chanting for a reunified Cyprus.
Talat, meanwhile, has raised the possibility of a settlement by the end of this year.
“It depends on the Greek-Cypriot side, if they have the will I am sure we can find a solution by the end of the year,” he said on Monday.
He insisted that any deal would have to provide for two politically equal “constituent states,” a concept which has been anathema to the Greek-Cypriot community which makes up more than 80 percent of the island’s population.
Preparatory talks at committee level since March have been accompanied by confidence-building measures, notably the opening of a crossing in Ledra Street linking south and north in the symbolic heart of old Nicosia.
It is the first intensive push for peace since a UN reunification plan was approved by Turkish Cypriots but overwhelmingly rejected by Greek Cypriots, just a week before the island joined the EU in 2004.
Optimists are pinning their hopes on the personal chemistry and shared left-wing politics of the two leaders.
Christofias was elected in February on a platform of relaunching peace efforts. Talat led the Turkish Cypriot “yes” vote in 2004.
Any agreement the leaders reach will then have to be sold to the two communities in simultaneous referendums.
Cyprus has been divided since 1974 when tens of thousands of Turkish troops occupied its northern third in response to an Athens-engineered Greek Cypriot coup seeking union with Greece.
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
Some things might go without saying, but just in case... Belgium’s food agency issued a public health warning as the festive season wrapped up on Tuesday: Do not eat your Christmas tree. The unusual message came after the city of Ghent, an environmentalist stronghold in the country’s East Flanders region, raised eyebrows by posting tips for recycling the conifers on the dinner table. Pointing with enthusiasm to examples from Scandinavia, the town Web site suggested needles could be stripped, blanched and dried — for use in making flavored butter, for instance. Asked what they thought of the idea, the reply
In the East Room of the White House on a particularly frigid Saturday afternoon, US President Joe Biden bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 of the most famous names in politics, sports, entertainment, civil rights, LGBTQ+ advocacy and science. Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton aroused a standing ovation from the crowd as she received her medal. Clinton was accompanied to the event by her husband, former US president Bill Clinton, daughter, Chelsea Clinton, and grandchildren. Democratic philanthropist George Soros and actor-director Denzel Washington were also awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor in a White House
RSS