By Jean Christou
AN ISTANBUL meeting between businessmen from both sides of the Green Line will focus on implementation of decisions taken at previous meetings of the group, one of the organisers said yesterday.
Businessmen from Greece, Turkey and both communities in Cyprus will meet in Istanbul on Sunday in a two-day session, to be chaired by US presidential envoy Richard Holbrooke.
“We are calling it the implementation conference,” said Stein Stoa, special envoy of the Norwegian International Peace Research Institute Oslo, which helps organise the businessmen’s meetings.
“It will be a working conference with very few flashy speeches,” Stoa said adding that the meeting would focus on three key words: ‘open’, ‘realistic’ and ‘specific’.
The Istanbul meeting is the follow-up to two previous ones. The first was held in Brussels at Holbrooke’s initiative in November 1997 and the second in Oslo last July.
According to reports in yesterday’s Turkish press, the meeting is only going ahead because of US pressure on Ankara.
The Turkish government, the report said, had previously been distinctly unenthusiastic about the initiative, and the Istanbul meeting was only given the go-ahead after insistent demands by the United States.
“The Americans insisted very much. They attribute a great importance to this initiative and believe that it can bring about a breakthrough in the Cyprus problem. We do not believe that it can bear any fruit, but we agreed to the organisation of the conference as a kind of goodwill gesture,” a high level Turkish Foreign Ministry official told the Turkish Daily News.
In order to evade legal obstructions preventing the Greek Cypriots from entering Turkey, their visas will not be stamped on their passports, but on separate slips of paper.
Around 10 Greek Cypriots will travel to the meeting in Istanbul, according to businessman Constantinos Lordos.
“We will be discussing the implementation of decisions taken at previous meetings,” Lordos said. “We are not getting very far.”
Out of a list of objectives made at the original meeting, so far the Brussels Group has managed have telecommunications between the two sides transformed from a manual three-line system to an automated 20 lines.
Now they plan to focus their efforts on the protection and preservation of the cultural heritage on both sides.
According to the Turkish press, Ankara and the Turkish Cypriot regime are playing down the importance of the initiative, emphasising that the core of the problem is political and that the targets determined by the forum cannot be met “given the political reality on the island”.
The Greek and Turkish Cypriot businessmen cannot meet in Cyprus due to a ban on all bi-communal contacts imposed by Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash over the EU’s decision to begin accession talks with Cyprus.
The Turkish side is also irritated by the massage conveyed by the Holbrooke initiative that there is no problem between the two communities in Cyprus.
“We are trying to achieve a joint strategy, taking the political climate into consideration,” Stoa said.
He said that, in addition to Holbrooke, the conference would also be attended by US State Department Co-ordinator Thomas Miller and US ambassador to Cyprus Kenneth Brill.
Oslo Institute Director Dan Smith will also be attending, along with representatives of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry and the Norwegian ambassadors to Cyprus, Greece and Turkey.
“We are trying to bring all the experts we have to Istanbul and use this as a basis for constructive discussion,” Stoa said.
