UN’s DiCarlo to meet Tatar on February 10

DiCarlo’s meeting with Tatar is the first date to be announced of her forthcoming trip to Cyprus, when she will also meet President Nikos Christodoulides and travel to both Ankara and Athens to meet members of the Turkish and Greek governments.

DiCarlo’s visit is set to come ahead of a planned “enlarged meeting” on the Cyprus problem which will involve Cyprus’ three guarantor powers, Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, as well as the UN, and will likely take place in March.

Tatar has remained insistent that the UK play a “lesser” role in the meeting, having previously publicly been against the idea of British involvement, before agreeing to a “4+1+1” format, with the “four” being the Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities and Turkey and Greece, and the two “plus ones” being the UN and the UK.

He also insisted that negotiations on the basis of a federal solution to the Cyprus problem must not happen.

“No model can be successful if the realities on the ground are not reflected on the negotiating table. We now know what does not work after a 56-year negotiating process. This is very important for the search for a compromise. We have seen in 56 years that a federal model does not work. We have tried and seen every method,” he said.

This drew criticism from former Turkish Cypriot chief negotiator Ozdil Nami, who served under Turkish Cypriot leaders Mehmet Ali Talat and Mustafa Akıncı.

Akinci said the enlarged meeting “will not be productive” unless all sides agree to pursue a solution in line with the UN Security Council’s resolutions on Cyprus.

“The current staff and the declarations they make are not serious,” he said, adding that for this reason, the enlarged meeting “will most likely not be meaningful”.

On this matter, he said Ersin Tatar’s policy of pursuing a two-state solution to the Cyprus problem since being elected as Turkish Cypriot leader in 2020 “has not brought any success” and added that “a new process should be adopted for a solution”.

Source: Cyprus Mail