The meeting between the President of the Republic, Nikos Christodoulides, and the leader of the Turkish Cypriot community, Tufan Erhurman, is scheduled for 4pm today, in the presence of the Personal Envoy of the UN Secretary-General, Maria Angela Holguin Cuellar.
President Christodoulides, in statements made in the past few days, said that he is going to the meeting with the aim of seeing how the two leaders are creating the conditions for resuming the talks from where they were interrupted in Crans Montana. He also noted that he is ready to discuss the MOU and that he himself has several new ideas.
The meeting with Ms. Holguin will be preceded by a visit by the two leaders to the Committee of Inquiry into Missing Persons.
Following the meeting, they will attend an informal reception hosted by the Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the UN Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, Kassim Dian.
Meanwhile, on Thursday morning, President Christodoulides meets with the European Union's envoy for the Cyprus issue, Johannes Hahn.
Government Spokesperson, Konstantinos Letymbiotis, said on Wednesday that President Christodoulides will approach the meeting with the Turkish Cypriot leader with the same seriousness, with the same constructive attitude, with the sobriety but also with the political will that characterizes the Greek Cypriot side, maintaining as its sole goal the restart of the process of substantive negotiations.
He noted that the joint visit of the two leaders to the Anthropological Laboratory of the Committee of Inquiry for Missing Persons in Cyprus (CMP) that will precede will send a strong message of determination that the search for the fate of the missing remains unabated and ongoing, adding that President Christodoulides has already convened a National Council on Friday, December 12 in the afternoon to inform the country's political leadership of the outcome of his latest contacts.
"The involvement of the European Union in the efforts to resume negotiations was a goal that President Christodoulides himself had personally set from the very beginning, and the appointment of an Envoy from the European Union, his mission and terms of reference, create an additional diplomatic capacity, which did not exist until now and certainly lends itself to exploitation. The meeting, of course, will take place at a very critical moment, on a very critical day for the Cyprus issue, as the personal Envoy of the United Nations Secretary-General, Ms. Holguin, is already in our country," he noted.
He added that the President of the Republic's goal in the discussion is to raise substantive issues related to the Cyprus problem and to convene the next multilateral conference as soon as possible, as the Secretary-General of the United Nations himself has announced, while a review of the progress of the confidence-building measures that were agreed upon during the last two multilateral conferences is also expected.
Source: KYPE
