Holguin, Christodoulides and Erhurman to hold tripartite meeting

United Nations envoy Maria Angela Holguin will meet with President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman in the buffer zone on Wednesday.

The joint meeting is expected to address the differences Holguin identified during her separate meetings with both leaders on Tuesday, as well as the four-point plan set out by Erhurman in the previous months.

“This is the agenda tomorrow [Wednesday] and I hope there will be progress,” she said.

Government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis said on Wednesday morning that Christodoulides is going to the meeting with the aim of achieving progress towards the resumption of negotiations.

He said that during the meeting, Christodoulides will submit a comprehensive proposal for the resumption of talks within the agreed framework.

After Holguin’s meeting with Christodoulides on Tuesday, she highlighted the need to strengthen confidence-building measures (CBMs) as part of the process.

“[It] depends on the progress of the two leaders on the issue of the [CBMs].”

Holguin said that without advances on CBMs, convening an enlarged 5+1 meeting – including both communities, the representatives from the three guarantor powers Greece, Turkey, and Britain and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres – would be “very difficult.”

“There has not been enough progress,” she said.

Holguin on Tuesday promised that today’s tripartite meeting would be “of substance”, expressing her hope that both leaders “deliver something for the confidence-building measures and continue working.”

Letymbiotis had described Tuesday’s meeting between Holguin and Christodoulides as “very good”, saying that Christodoulides had clearly laid out his approach for the resumption of negotiations.

Meanwhile, Erhurman’s undersecretary Mehmet Dana said his meeting with Holguin had “addressed developments since the last tripartite meeting” held mid-December, as well as “impasses which have emerged regarding confidence-building measures”.

The Turkish Cypriot leader had in December insisted that no enlarged meeting could be held until the issues that were to be discussed were “fully discussed” in Cyprus.

Today’s meeting will be held at the residence of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative in Cyprus and head of Unficyp Khassim Diagne, in the buffer zone, at 11am.