Time is short, says UN S-G

The window of opportunity for further progress in negotiations is very much limited, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in New York at his end of year press conference this week.

“I believe that time is quite limited”, he added as Cyprus is going to take the Presidency of the European Union from 1 July next year.

“It may be politically difficult and sensitive, when the Presidency of the European Union is now going to be part of this. And practically speaking, the Presidency of the European Union will be heavily involved in all other European issues. Therefore, we are trying to maximize this progress in Cyprus”, he explained.

He said he would be spending two days with the two leader at Greentree in late January for “a more intensive consultation, negotiation, than the previous Greentree negotiations”.

“We hope that with the positive result of the January negotiations, we can move ahead towards the international conference to deal with these issues. But let us hope that, before they come to Greentree, both leaders must engage and make progress, accelerating their pace of negotiation”.

The UN Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution extending the mandate of the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) until 19 July 2012.

The Cyprus government described the resolution as sufficiently balanced.

“The resolution does not include the problematic provision, present in the first drafts, for convening an international conference without the prior achievement of an agreement on the internal aspects of the problem”, a spokesman said.

“The wording that was adopted and is included in the resolution’s preamble is based on the Secretary General’s statement at Green Tree, which sets as a precondition the resolution of the internal aspects of the problem, in order to be able to proceed to a multilateral conference”, he said.

He went on: “At the same time, the consent of the two sides for convening such a conference is added as a condition, a position which is in agreement with our side’s position on the specific issue. The resolution contains no form of timeframe. There is an appeal for further work towards the solution of the Cyprus problem in the next few months, a period for which the resolution has been approved. The importance of practical steps by interested parties on Cyprus is underlined, to assist the leaders of the two communities in the negotiations, a reference which indirectly refers to Turkey”.

Kibris reports that the Turkish Cypriot leader, Dervis Eroglu, has said that five out of the six chapters of the Cyprus problem have been discussed.

He added that the Turkish Cypriot side had submitted a 50-page proposal on the property issue to the Greek Cypriot side and had informed them in a very clear manner about the criteria of the Turkish side on territory.

Eroglu claimed that the Greek Cypriots were exerting no effort toward reaching an agreement in this direction said that the Greek Cypriot side should exert at least as much effort as the Turkish Cypriot side in order for an agreement to be reached in the negotiations. He said that even though the chapters are not closed yet, they continue to have hopes.

Eroglu argued that they are taking some steps and try to achieve convergences. He added: “The important thing is to increase these convergences and finalize the chapters”.