DEMETRIS Christofias and Dervis Eroglu will go to tomorrow’s meeting with the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in Geneva not knowing what is in store. If they do know, they have chosen not to give anything away, presumably because they do not want to fuel speculation at home, which serves no useful purpose.
In fact, the speculation about the Geneva meeting has been almost non-existent, in stark contrast to the build-up of the November meeting with Ban in New York, which gave rise to a host of alarmist scenarios, about arbitration, time-frames, traps and the dreaded international conference. As none of these materialised, politicians and journalists chose a more cautious approach to tomorrow’s meeting, urging Christofias to report the Turkish side to Ban for its intransigence and pursuit of a two-state solution.
Given the experience of the past, it would be naïve to believe that Ban would take up the meeting deciding whether the sides are within the agreed framework of the talks or not. When he met the two leaders in November, he asked them to intensify their meetings, try to agree on as many issues as possible and list the issues on which there was disagreement. He also asked them to propose ways of overcoming points of contention when he met them again in Geneva.
Did they follow Ban’s advice? The leaders intensified their meetings, for a short period, but then Eroglu fell ill and needed heart surgery, putting everything on hold; the advisors however, carried on meeting regularly. With regard to agreeing more issues, some progress was reportedly made by the advisors, but nothing to cause great optimism. After the penultimate meeting of the two leaders, Christofias accused Eroglu of bringing up the old Turkish demand for a ‘confederation of two states’, thus re-opening the governance chapter, which was all but agreed.
And what are the chances, in these circumstances, that the two sides would have come up with practical proposals for bridging their differences? In short, we should deduce that Ban and his special envoy Alexander Downer will have little to work on tomorrow. Then again, it is highly unlikely that the two leaders will be allowed to leave Geneva without agreement on something. In his progress report, issued a few days after the New York meeting, Ban said that he expected “substantive agreement across all chapters” by the end of March.
What is the probability of the two sides meeting this deadline, after which there was a danger of the talks ‘foundering fatally’? We will have an idea of whether Ban’s ultra-optimistic target will be met by tomorrow evening.
