President Nikos Christodoulides received María Ángela Holguín, the personal envoy of the United Nations Secretary-General for the Cyprus issue, at the Presidential Palace on Monday, ahead of a high-profile visit by the UN chief later today.
Speaking after the meeting, Government Spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis said the talks had been held in view of António Guterres’s visit to Cyprus, during which he is due to meet separately with Mr Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhürman on Tuesday morning, attend a joint dinner that evening, and hold a joint meeting with both leaders the following day.
“A very important visit, as we have said many times in the past few days,” Mr Letymbiotis said, adding that the government hoped it would prove “the springboard” towards convening an expanded conference on the island’s future.
Ms Holguín had briefed the president on a series of recent contacts, he said, before departing to meet Mr Erhürman.
Asked whether her account of talks with Turkey’s foreign minister gave grounds for optimism, the spokesman urged caution, noting that Mr Guterres had personally invested time and institutional standing in the initiative since March, but that “Turkish intransigence” remained the principal obstacle.
He noted that Mr Guterres and his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan had spoken by telephone the previous night, and that Mr Christodoulides would raise Ankara’s intentions directly with the Secretary-General on Tuesday.
Pressed on whether any common ground had emerged, Mr Letymbiotis said the only agreed basis for a settlement remained existing UN Security Council resolutions. “Without having more hopes than Turkey’s stance allows,” he said, the government would seize on any “glimmer of hope” arising from the visit and from wider developments in EU-Turkish relations.
Asked about reports that the Turkish foreign minister had pressed Ms Holguín on a two-state solution, the spokesman declined to comment on the specifics of that meeting, but reiterated that the only settlement under discussion at the UN was one based on a bizonal, bicommunal federation with political equality, as set out in Security Council resolutions. Any pursuit of an alternative model, he said, could not be regarded as constructive.
Questioned on reports that Mr Guterres intended to update the so-called Crans-Montana framework from the failed 2017 talks, Mr Letymbiotis said Cyprus’s goal remained to resume negotiations from the point at which they broke down, while preserving prior progress. He said Nicosia welcomed the Secretary-General’s efforts to build towards a multilateral conference on substantive issues, provided it led back to that same point.
Asked whether the government would entertain “constructive ambiguities” in any settlement framework that might in practice diverge from a bizonal, bicommunal federation, the spokesman said there could be no ambiguity, creative or otherwise, on Cyprus’s “perennial red lines” — preservation of the Republic of Cyprus, the agreed UN framework, the “three freedoms”, and alignment with EU law and values. This, he said, reflected not only the government’s position but that of the wider international community and the European Union.
