Holguín warns window for Cyprus progress is closing
The opportunity to make progress on the Cyprus issue is gradually slipping away, UN Secretary-General’s Personal Envoy María Ángela Holguín Cuéllar has warned, as she prepares for further talks on the island in October.
In an interview with ANKA News Agency, Holguín said the two sides had yet to show the political will needed to put agreed confidence-building measures into practice. She also warned that hostile actions and developments in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean were making an already difficult diplomatic effort more complicated.
“The favourable opportunity we had throughout last year and at the beginning of this year is clearly fading,” she said.
Holguín gave further details of the proposed meeting between President Tufan Erhürman, Greek Cypriot leader Nikos Christodoulides and UN Secretary-General António Guterres in New York last week. She said no such meeting had been scheduled: Guterres had planned to see the two leaders separately, before Christodoulides proposed a joint meeting.
According to Holguín, Erhürman asked whether Christodoulides had a new proposal that would make a meeting meaningful. When Christodoulides repeated proposals he had made previously, Erhürman concluded that the conditions for a productive meeting were not in place.
Turning to confidence-building measures, Holguín said the sides had agreed to establish a technical committee on natural disasters but had not settled how they would respond jointly to an emergency. She said measures concerning irregular migration, mine clearance and sport could also move forward if the necessary political will existed.
New crossing points could strengthen contact between the two communities, she added, citing possible routes at Kiracıköy–Eğlence, Haspolat and Akıncılar–Limya. A crossing at Haspolat could also benefit trade, she said, but there had so far been no political will to advance it.
Holguín said her October contacts would focus on both the substance of negotiations and the method for conducting them, with the aim of creating the conditions for a constructive 5+1 meeting with a concrete agenda. The UN is also working on a document setting out points of convergence from earlier negotiations, but she said sharing it before talks begin could provoke a fresh dispute over how the previous record should be interpreted.
She stressed that the UN’s role was to help the parties find a way forward, not to prescribe the outcome. “The UN is in Cyprus to facilitate, not to impose or dictate what should be done,” she said.
Asked about attempts to restrict Turkish Cypriot representatives’ international contacts and other actions that undermine trust, Holguín said such steps made the problem more difficult. Cooperation and mutual acceptance were necessary for meaningful talks, she said, adding: “Negotiations do not emerge on their own, nor are they born from a hostile environment.”
