Guterres arrives in Cyprus for one last push on a settlement

Politics Cyprus problemTop Newsturkeyun Guterres arrives in Cyprus for one last push on a settlement 105a1727 D37c 425c A337 D882e44d4fc7 Relevant News Guterres arrives in Cyprus for one last push on a settlement 26 July 2026 Reported Houthi attack on Saudi Aramco site renews Red Sea shipping concerns (videos) 25 July 2026 Suspects flee police in Larnaca and crash while loaded with drugs (photos) 25 July 2026 Ernestos Mousas 26 July 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber UN Secretary-General António Guterres lands in Cyprus tomorrow with one goal: restarting substantive Cyprus talks within the next few months. It is his first visit to the island in 16 years as Secretary-General, and it comes nine years after the talks collapsed at the Crans-Montana conference. His term ends this winter, and he wants concrete progress before he leaves. Spending two full days on the island is itself a statement of intent, and a signal to every party involved that he expects the same commitment from them. Turkey again looks like the decisive player. Two days ago, the Secretary-General’s Personal Envoy on Cyprus, María Ángela Holguín, met Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan in Ankara, a meeting that reinforces that reading. Four figures with deep knowledge of the Cyprus problem and its diplomacy spoke to “Phileleftheros tis Kyriakis” ahead of the first UN Secretary-General visit to the island in 16 years: former Greek Cypriot negotiator Andreas Mavroyiannis; Fikri Toros, Foreign Relations Secretary and member of the Turkish Cypriot Parliament for the Republican Turkish Party (CTP); former Justice and Public Order Minister Anna Koukkides-Procopiou; and political scientist Vasilis Protopapas, a member of the Cyprus problem team set up by the President of the Republic. Andreas Mavroyiannis: No room for experiments or manoeuvring Andreas Mavroyiannis is a personal friend of António Guterres. He told Phileleftheros the Secretary-General knows the Cyprus problem well. Their working relationship goes back to January 2017, days after Guterres took office, when efforts toward a solution were at their peak. Mavroyiannis, then negotiator, brought the UN’s Good Offices mission to full strength during that period. He personally attended the January 12, 2017 security meeting in Geneva, then took a leading role that June at Crans-Montana, where the Secretary-General’s six points anchored the push for a decisive breakthrough. Tomorrow’s arrival, Mavroyiannis said, expresses Guterres’s commitment to Cyprus and to solving the Cyprus problem. The Secretary-General wants to listen, take soundings, and see whether he can help free the process from an impasse he believes Turkey has created. Mavroyiannis pointed to Turkey’s demand that its EU-Turkey grievances be resolved before any movement, without offering concessions of its own. That demand, he said, is why an informal 5+1 meeting — one that would restart substantive talks from where Crans-Montana left off — has not been possible in the near term. He urged the Greek Cypriot side to seize this opportunity. Reaffirm commitment to the Security Council resolutions, he said. Reaffirm the convergences already reached, the ground already covered in the process, and the six points Guterres proposed at Crans-Montana as the basis for a framework agreement that would make a settlement irreversible. There is no room, he stressed, for experiments or manoeuvring — tactics that would not just fail, but drag the process into deadlock and cost it its foundation altogether. Guterres’s term ends this year, and Mavroyiannis said that adds weight to the visit. It confirms, in his view, the UN’s role as guardian of international law and a catalyst for peace and security, at a moment when multilateralism itself is under unprecedented strain. Fikri Toros: Only a mutually acceptable solution based on political equality will work In a written statement issued on July 23, 2026, Fikri Toros, Foreign Relations Secretary and a member of the Turkish Cypriot Parliament for the Republican Turkish Party (CTP), said the forthcoming Guterres visit “is more than a diplomatic engagement.” He said: “It is a clear indication that the United Nations remains committed to helping the parties move beyond the prolonged impasse and towards a sustainable settlement of the Cyprus problem.” Toros added that the Secretary-General’s personal involvement “demonstrates that the United Nations, supported by the international community, prioritizes the settlement of the Cyprus issue within the security and energy focused regional architecture.” For the Turkish Cypriot community, Toros said, the visit “is particularly meaningful.” He said: “It reminds us that our future must not be defined by desolation or by absence of inclusivity, but by effective participation built on political equality within a federal Cyprus that assures lasting peace, stability and prosperity for the Cypriot people.” He said preserving the current diplomatic momentum “brought by the UN Secretary-General’s new initiative, is therefore of great value and must be supported by all concerned.” Toros continued: “After years of stagnation, renewed engagement of the UNSG creates an opportunity to rebuild confidence and restore the constituency of support to a fair and just solution of our decades long political problem. This opportunity must be seized at all costs!” The visit, Toros said, “should be seen as part of a broader effort to set the ground for the resumption of meaningful negotiations, with a revised approach assuring conclusivity within a sense of urgency.” He said expectations “should remain realistic, but realism should never become an excuse for inaction.” Toros added: “Genuine commitment must prevail at all parties, optimism and faith must be conveyed to all Cypriots.” He said experience to date “has proven that, every initiative that encourages communication and cooperation facilitated by confidence building measures has contributed to an environment conducive for progress along prospective federal partnership.” Toros said responsibility now lies with both leaders “to demonstrate the much needed simultaneous political will and courage, which are imperative to moving beyond entrenched positions and reaching to a compromised political agreement for the greater good of our Island.” He said sustainable peace, stability and prosperity in the shared homeland and the Eastern Mediterranean “cannot emerge from unilateral approaches or the pursuit of separate futures,” adding that it “requires a shared commitment and convergence of wills, aimed at a mutually acceptable settlement founded on political equality, security and respect for the legitimate rights of both communities.” Toros said: “A process must not be for the sake of attaining a process, but one that assures a comprehensive political agreement.” Toros said he remains convinced that a comprehensive settlement based on a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation with political equality, “in full line with all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions and the body of work constituted by all convergences reached over decades of negotiations, is the only genuinely realistic, mutually acceptable and internationally legitimate path forward.” He said Guterres’s visit “provides an important opportunity to reaffirm this framework and to transform the present momentum into a renewed, credible and conclusive negotiation process.” Toros concluded: “People of Cyprus deserve no less.” Anna Koukkides-Procopiou: Guterres’s choice to visit Erhürman’s “presidential” building is odd Anna Koukkides-Procopiou, the former Justice and Public Order Minister, told Phileleftheros the Guterres visit is being read positively after months of no movement. It is a step toward restarting negotiations, she said, and that is exactly what is needed right now. But a step is not enough on its own. Unless the five parties bring real political will to the table on substance, she warned, a five-party meeting could do more harm than good. Security and the statehood questions that any Cyprus solution must answer need to be on the table, not sidestepped. Without that groundwork, she said, such a meeting risks burying the Cyprus problem instead of reviving it, with the absence of common ground formally on record. The next steps, she said, need to be strategic, not symbolic. She also addressed reports suggesting the shape of Holguín’s emerging position, even though Holguín has not put anything forward formally yet. The Greek Cypriot side, she said, needs specific answers and counterproposals ready, grounded in UN Security Council resolutions. She pointed specifically to Resolution 550 of 1984, which declares the so-called “TRNC” a legally invalid secessionist entity and calls on all UN member states not to take any action that facilitates or recognises it. One detail struck her as odd: reports that the Secretary-General plans to meet Tufan Erhürman at the “presidential” building in the occupied north. If accurate, she said, this matters because the Secretary-General acts under the Security Council’s mandate. “Although one might propose a loose approach to international law,” she said, “the UN Secretary-General remains, even today, its guardian. If the institution itself does not want this, it is good for us to know it, with full awareness of where a process conducted under UN auspices, yet not governed by UN principles, can lead.” Vasilis Protopapas: The responsibility is Guterres’s — and the Cypriots’ too Political scientist Vasilis Protopapas sits on the Cyprus problem team set up by the President of the Republic. He told Phileleftheros that a successful visit isn’t just on Guterres. Most of the responsibility, he said, sits with the two communities and their leaders. This is not a ceremonial stop, he added. It comes after years in which the Cyprus problem has sat frozen, at a moment when the wider world keeps proving that frozen conflicts don’t stay frozen forever. Since Crans-Montana collapsed in 2017, Turkey has pulled away from the federal framework, Protopapas said, making any agreement far harder to reach. Getting even this much movement back took real effort: two informal five-party conferences in 2025, a change of leadership on the Turkish Cypriot side, and a more active European Union now linking EU-Turkey relations to the Cyprus problem. Nine years after the night Guterres wished both sides “good luck” as the talks fell apart, he looks determined to make one final push before his term runs out, Protopapas said. The timing isn’t perfect, he added, but it’s the best on offer. A narrow window has opened. “There is no time,” he said, “to ‘preserve’ the moment while looking for better conditions in the future.” The gap between the two sides looks unbridgeable to him. Without the Secretary-General’s good offices, and some mediation effort of his own, he said, the deadlock will hold and the gap will widen. The real question, in his view, is whether Guterres will commit to a move as bold as his 2017 framework, or bolder. Responsibility still sits mainly with the two communities, he stressed, but the international community has levers too — it can encourage, propose, pressure or entice Turkey, which holds the key, to drop its partition rhetoric. “But no one,” he said, “can substitute for the will of the Cypriots to seek a common federal future with political equality.” Protopapas noted one more thing: the visit falls just days after the commemorations for 1974. “Memory has no value,” he said, “when it keeps us fixed on yesterday. It has value when it reminds us of the cost of division, and mobilises us not to allow the occupation and separation to become a permanent normality.” Read more: Christodoulides draws red line on sovereignty as UN chief and EU envoy set to visit Cyprus Subscribe to our Newsletter Latest News Reported Houthi attack on Saudi Aramco site renews Red Sea shipping concerns (videos) Suspects flee police in Larnaca and crash while loaded with drugs (photos) Cyprus private debt drops to a third of 2012 peak Overnight pharmacies on Saturday, July 25 “We Are the Voices of Many People”: Larnaka reimagines memory through human traces Two arrested over EAC €9,000 transformer theft in Moni Hunter-placed illegal feeding stations pose growing risk to Cyprus wildlife Follow en.philenews on Google News and be the first to know all the news about Cyprus and the world.