Our View: Call for Plan B to solve Cyprob justified

PRESIDENT Christofias and Dervis Eroglu on Monday met for the first time since their meeting with the UN Secretary General in New York. It was a brief encounter during which they scheduled three meetings for December. Their aides, who would be meeting twice a week, would work out their schedule on Friday.

The two sides are showing a sense of urgency, which had been lacking before the New York meeting and had been highlighted by Ban Ki-moon in his report – he described the procedure as ‘sluggish’. There is no guarantee that the two men would be more productive and cover more ground just because they were “intensifying their contacts”. The talks were intensified a few months ago as well but led nowhere.

Ban has made it quite clear that he would not allow this to happen again, by setting an unofficial time-frame. On January 26 and 27 he is due to meet Christofias and Eroglu in Geneva to establish how much progress had been made and on which issues there was still disagreement. They would be discussing all chapters at their meetings with a view to overcoming points of disagreement. The points on which convergence was not possible would be discussed with Ban in Geneva.

There is speculation that at the January meeting the UN would try to bridge the differences with its own proposals, even though this would not be arbitration. The sides would still be able to reject proposals, at the risk of being blamed for the breakdown of the procedure which, evidently, neither seems to want. The threat of declaring a deadlock and calling an end to the UN procedure is the only way for Ban to apply pressure on the two sides, even though there is a limit to how far he could go. How could either leader urge people to vote in favour of an agreement that he was forced to accept against his will?

Under the circumstances House President Marios Garoyian’s comment about the need for a ‘plan B’ was not as unreasonable as the AKEL chief tried to make out. Admittedly, it should not be the subject of public debate, but it would be reassuring to know that the government has developed one because it recognises that the UN procedure, one way or the other, is drawing to a close. This was alluded to in Ban’s statement after the meeting and made crystal clear in the report about the talks he released subsequently.

Despite Christofias’ assertions to the contrary, the procedure has been changed by Ban’s insistence on progress and his setting a deadline for achieving this. In this context, the call for a ‘plan B’ is more than justified.