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.
ANGER: A video shared online showed residents in a neighborhood confronting the national security minister, attempting to drag her toward floodwaters Argentina’s port city of Bahia Blanca has been “destroyed” after being pummeled by a year’s worth of rain in a matter of hours, killing 13 and driving hundreds from their homes, authorities said on Saturday. Two young girls — reportedly aged four and one — were missing after possibly being swept away by floodwaters in the wake of Friday’s storm. The deluge left hospital rooms underwater, turned neighborhoods into islands and cut electricity to swaths of the city. Argentine Minister of National Security Patricia Bullrich said Bahia Blanca was “destroyed.” The death toll rose to 13 on Saturday, up from 10 on Friday, authorities
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
Local officials from Russia’s ruling party have caused controversy by presenting mothers of soldiers killed in Ukraine with gifts of meat grinders, an appliance widely used to describe Russia’s brutal tactics on the front line. The United Russia party in the northern Murmansk region posted photographs on social media showing officials smiling as they visited bereaved mothers with gifts of flowers and boxed meat grinders for International Women’s Day on Saturday, which is widely celebrated in Russia. The post included a message thanking the “dear moms” for their “strength of spirit and the love you put into bringing up your sons.” It
DISASTROUS VISIT: The talks in Saudi Arabia come after an altercation at the White House that led to the Ukrainian president leaving without signing a minerals deal Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was due to arrive in Saudi Arabia yesterday, a day ahead of crucial talks between Ukrainian and US officials on ending the war with Russia. Highly anticipated negotiations today on resolving the three-year conflict would see US and Ukrainian officials meet for the first time since Zelenskiy’s disastrous White House visit last month. Zelenskiy yesterday said that he would meet Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the nation’s de facto leader, after which his team “will stay for a meeting on Tuesday with the American team.” At the talks in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, US
RSS