Earlier this evening TRNC President Mustafa Akıncı received a call from UN Secretary-General António Guterres, inviting the Turkish Cypriot leader to attend a meeting at the UN headquarters in New York. A similar invitation has been extended to the Greek Cypriot leader Nicos Anastasiadis.
According to the TRNC President’s spokesman, Mustafa Akıncı has accepted the invitation and will attend the meeting, expected to take place on Monday 5 June.
The hastily arranged meeting follows news last week that shuttle diplomacy by the UN’s special envoy to Cyprus, Espen Barth Eide, had failed to find a suitable formula to bring the two leaders together for a new Cyprus summit in Switzerland. As a result, the current round of talks, now two years old, seemed to be on the brink of collapse.
The UN Secretary-General’s intervention aims to salvage the talks before Nicos Anastasiadis embeds himself in a re-election campaign. South Cyprus will hold Presidential Elections in February 2018.
Photo: Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (centre) with Nicos Anastasiades and Mustafa Akinci during Cyrpus talks in Geneva, 12 January 2017. UN Photo / Jean-Marc Ferré
