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Roundup: Cypriot leaders fail to agree on terms for restarting stalled negotiations

Xinhua, May 18, 2017 Adjust font size:

The United Nations (UN) was unable to restart the stalled Cyprus reunification negotiations despite day-long consultations with the island's leaders, a UN official said on Thursday.

"No white smoke came out of my meetings," the UN Secretary-General's special adviser on Cyprus, Espen Barth Eide, said after separate meetings with Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades and Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci.

The two leaders had a five-hour meeting on Wednesday which ended in disarray after they failed to agree on the terms for the continuation of their negotiations.

Eide, a former foreign minister of Norway, said his meetings with Anastasiades and Akinci were inconclusive, but added that he would continue his intensive go-between effort until common ground was found.

"There is no indication of how long it will take," Eide said, adding that his round of consultations may last through next week.

The disagreement between the two sides seems to focus on the agenda of an international conference on Cyprus.

Akinci said that at Wednesday's meeting he suggested a resumption of the Geneva conference to discuss all remaining pending issues as a package.

But he also demanded that the Greek Cypriot side, which runs the internationally-recognized government, must abandon plans to start exploratory drilling in July for the discovery of natural gas in the exclusive economic zone of Cyprus, demarcated under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

Anastasiades was reported by Turkish Cypriot media to have made a proposal for the resumption of the Geneva conference, but with a different agenda.

However, Akinci dismissed the proposal saying the agenda amounted to preconditions by Anastasiades.

Eide said that the United Nations was ready to reconvene the Geneva conference once this had been decided by the two Cypriot leaders.

"There are some issues of crucial importance that have to be agreed upon by the leaders themselves," said Eide. Endit