Our View: Why is UN time and energy being spent on Cyprus?

Everyone has been asking the same question ever since the visit of the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was announced 10 days ago. What is the purpose of his visit? Little has been said about the purpose of visit – the first by a UNSG in 16 years – apart from a UN diplomatic source in Brussels informing the Cyprus News Agency that Guterres would seek concrete results from his meetings before moving the process to a five-party informal conference. The UN was more forthcoming about his itinerary. His first meeting will be at the presidential palace with President Nikos Christodoulides on Tuesday morning, and it will be followed by a meeting with Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman at his office in the north. In the afternoon, he will have meetings with the Committee for Missing Persons, the negotiators and the heads of the technical committees, while in the evening he will host a dinner for the leaders. On Wednesday morning there will be a meeting with the two leaders, which will be the first time Guterres is meeting Erhurman and Christodoulides together. The last time he had a meeting with the two leaders – July 2025, in New York – Ersin Tatar was still the Turkish Cypriot leader. His visit will end with a 30-minute news conference, just after the leaders’ meeting. Ban Ki-moon was the last UNSG to visit Cyprus, in 2010, and the lasting memory from that time was the outcry by the Greek Cypriot media and political parties because he visited Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat in his ‘presidential office’ in the north. Ban became the target of nasty criticism, while the idiotic argument that the visit would lead to an ‘upgrade’ of the pseudo-state was repeated ad-nauseam. The same will happen on Tuesday, the UN making it very clear that Guterres’ one-on-one meetings will take place at each leader’s office. The feared ‘upgrade’ never materialised and neither did the corresponding ‘downgrade’ of the status of the Republic. In fact, nothing came of Ban’s visit, the then president Demetris Christofias engaging in filibustering, which eventually led to the election of the hardline Turkish Cypriot leader Dervis Eroglu. Only after he was replaced by Mustafa Akinci was there a process, which finally resulted in the Crans Montana collapse of 2017, despite the personal involvement of Guterres. Why he has decided to undertake another initiative on the Cyprus issue after establishing, nine years ago, that the political will for a settlement did not exist, is the big question. And he is persisting despite the fact that his personal envoy Maria Angela Holguin’s first mission ended in failure, the broad informal meeting he held that included the guarantor powers led nowhere and the two leaders ignored his advice to engage in confidence-building measures. They have proved incapable of agreeing to the opening of another crossing point, after months of bickering, turning a straightforward issue into a zero-sum game. Nothing has happened in the last 18 months to offer the slightest hint that there is a possibility of a breakthrough or of a discovery of common ground, but Guterres, for unknown reasons, refuses to give up. He sent back Holguin despite the failure of her first mission, while plans to hold an informal five-party conference this month got nowhere, because prospects of success are non-existent. All this makes his decision to pay a two-day visit extremely difficult to understand. He will be leaving his post in less than six months, the UN is faced with countless, much more urgent problems, so why is he devoting valuable time to the Cyprus problem, which is no threat to world peace or regional stability? Has he been told by Turkish President Recip Tayyip Erdogan, whom he met not so long ago, that Turkey would not adhere to its two-state position if there was a new process? The Cyprus government spokesman said the visit was “very significant” and that Guterres would try to create the conditions for an expanded informal conference on Cyprus. At least, now we know he would seek concrete results before calling such a conference. Whether he secures these results we will find out in the coming week.