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Mont Pelerin / AFP
Rival Cypriot leaders on Sunday resumed UN-backed talks on ending the island’s 42-year-old division, with hopes of breakthrough high but a key territory dispute unsettled.
Greek Cypriot leader Nicos Anastasiades and his Turkish Cypriot counterpart Mustafa Akinci were meeting at a luxury hotel in Mont Pelerin, a town on the shores of Lake Geneva, for the second time this month.
“Now the meeting starts,” UN spokesman Aleem Siddique said at 0815 GMT, ushering journalists out of a room where the two delegations sat either side of a large table.
Experts say the meeting is the last best chance to reunify Cyprus, a Mediterranean island whose division remains one of the world’s longest-running political disputes.
“It can go either way since there are still substantial differences. But they are clearly in the final phase of the talks,” Hubert Faustmann, professor of history and political science at the University of Nicosia, said. Cyprus has been divided since 1974 when Turkish troops occupied its northern third in response to an Athens-inspired coup seeking union with Greece.
Anastasiades and Akinci met in Mont Pelerin earlier this month, between November 7-11, to discuss
potential territorial readjustments—seen by analysts as the trickiest issue to resolve. That round finished short of a deal but hopes are high that two more days of talks could produce a map of internal boundaries for a future federation of Greek- and Turkish-speaking states on the island.
“It sounds to me… as though they made a lot of progress last week and they are in the stage where one last burst of activity can really settle that,” British High Commissioner in Cyprus Matthew Kidd said.
“And I guess they wouldn’t have agreed to go back this weekend if they did not think so too.” The Turkish invasion saw thousands of Greek and Turkish Cypriots displaced. Territory is an intractable problem for the talks, since any agreement would inevitably involve a redrawing of existing boundaries and see members of both communities ousted from their current homes.