On Tuesday 24 July, the day after the visit of United Nations Special Envoy Jane Holl Lute to Cyprus with a view to a possible resumption of negotiations for the island's reunification (see EUROPE 12064), Turkey stepped up the pressure.
"If we rush to negotiate and fail again, negotiations may not be reopened. The process cannot bear another failure”, Turkey's Foreign Affairs Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu stated, after a meeting with the Turkish Cypriot leader, Mustafa Akinci. He stated that their meeting had focused on "the establishment of a just, viable and realistic settlement that will also guarantee the future and security of Turkish Cypriots".
Çavuşoğlu called on the Greek Cypriots "to stop behaving like the only owners of Cyprus". "The fact that the two parts of the island are politically equal is not going to change", he added. He warned that if the Greek Cypriots began drilling in their territorial waters, Turkey would do the same.
The previous day, Lute held separate meetings with Greek Cypriot President Nikos Anastasiades and Akinci. Anastasiades announced that the Greek Cypriot party was ready to begin a new dialogue where things had stopped in July 2017 (see EUROPE 11825). He wanted the Turkish Cypriots and Turkey "to respond positively to the new prospect that is presented again upon us, taking into account in a comprehensive manner and, without being selective, the provisions set by the Secretary-General at the Conference in Crans-Montana". On Sunday 22 July, the spokesperson for the government, Prodromos Prodromou, had said that an "agreement could come to light if Turkey changed its attitude and the intransigence it had shown at Crans-Montana and if its showed the necessary political resolve".
Before sending her report to the UN secretary general, Lute will visit Athens, Ankara, London and Brussels to meet EU representatives.
On Thursday 26 July, the UN Security Council could moreover prolong the mandate until 31 January 2019 of the United Nations force tasked with maintaining peace on Cyprus (UNFICYP). (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)