By Jean Christou
THE U.N. Security Council has formally welcomed next month’s planned face- to-face meeting between President Glafcos Clerides and Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash, saying it hoped fruitful negotiations would lead to a settlement.
Clerides and Denktash agreed on December 4 that they would resume direct talks in an attempt reach a settlement by June 2002.
” Council members welcome this and other positive developments, and hope that progress will be achieved at the negotiating table, resulting in a comprehensive settlement,”said a statement read by Mali Ambassador Moctar Ouane, this month’s Security Council president.
Pressure to reach a solution has been reinforced by Cyprus’ looming EU accession.
In Brussels, Foreign Minister Yiannakis Cassoulides said that if no comprehensive settlement were reached by June 2002, after six months of direct talks, it would mean the negotiations had no meaning. ” We will not allow it to be protracted up to December 2002, in order to avoid endangering Cyprus’ accession course,”Cassoulides said.
But he warned against back-door partition through confederation: ” We cannot accept that this island can be partitioned by designating one part as belonging to the Turks and the other part belonging to the Greeks,” he added. “We can accept the Swiss system in its totality and the Belgium system as well.”
Referring to the December 4 agreement to resume talks, Cassoulides said Denktash was either being sincere about negotiating or was making a tactical move.
“If he is sincere, of course, he will find President Clerides equally sincere and prepared and ready for a compromise within the spirit of give- and-take,” he said. And he added that, if Denktash had made a tactical move, it was to avoid external and internal pressure and to drag out negotiations in order to find an excuse to stop Cyprus’ EU accession or to lead the talks to failure, with both sides sharing the blame.
“The Turks now want EU screening; they most probably won’t get it but they want to cash in somehow. They want money, I am sure they will get something, ” Cassoulides said. “We don’t care about this but we do care to get a settlement in Cyprus.”
UN Secretary-general Kofi Annan regards the start of direct talks as a “positive development” and hopes negotiations will take place in good faith and lead to a comprehensive settlement.
In a letter to the President of the Security Council, Annan informed members that talks would start on January 16, 2002 at his invitation in the exercise of his mission of good offices.
“This agreement is a positive development and I would like to hope that, as they have agreed, they will negotiate in good faith until they achieve a comprehensive settlement,” he said in his letter dated December 10, which circulated Wednesday as an official UN document.
