THE LEADERS yesterday discussed governance and power sharing as part of intensified talks to end the island’s 37-year division.
President Demetris Christofias and Turkish Cypriot leader Dervis Eroglu met for over four hours at the United Nations Protected Area in Nicosia.
“The meeting took place in a positive atmosphere,” Lisa Buttenheim, Special Representative of the Secretary-General, told newsmen.
Yesterday’s was the first of four meetings devoted to governance and power sharing, core issues of the Cyprus talks. The discussion would continue on Friday, said Buttenheim.
The leaders’ top advisors will be holding a meeting Thursday to “discuss one issue that was raised this morning,” Buttenheim said, without elaborating.
She added that the leaders have agreed that, during this intensified phase, ensuring confidentiality about their discussions “will be a precondition for progress.”
Eroglu told reporters later that the two sides made “progress” on the chapter of governance and power sharing, and said he and Christofias would seek ways to clinch a deal by October.
Urged by the UN Secretary-General to pick up the pace, Christofias and Eroglu have agreed to meet twice weekly over the coming weeks.
The current phase of talks has a timetable until the end of October, when the two leaders will hold a three-way meet with the UN Secretary-General in New York to review progress.
Peace talks between the two communities have been limping along since their relaunch in 2008. The talks are Cypriot-led, with a United Nations team acting as facilitator in the process.
Earlier this month, during a three-way meeting in Geneva, UN chief Ban Ki-moon called on the two leaders to overcome their differences by October with a view to ending a conflict harming Turkey’s bid to join the European Union.
“I have every expectation that by October the leaders will be able to report they have reached convergence on all core issues and that we will meet that month in New York,” Ban said in a statement.
At the time Ban, who also met the Cypriot leaders in January in a bid to add momentum to the talks, said the sides had worked steadily to take the negotiations forward since then, but cautioned that progress had been “far too slow.”
