The doomed Cyprus rendezvous

The Turkish and Greek Cypriot leaders were to come together on Sept. 26 with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the U.N. headquarters in New York. The meeting was slated to last only 45 minutes and the Greek Cypriot leader made it clear in agreeing to attend the meeting that "only a review of the process" would be done to brief the secretary-general, "that's all." The Turkish Cypriot leader, however, was expecting the meeting to help overcome some remaining hurdles, ordain the secretary-general with some "breaching powers" and open the way to a five-party international conference - a meeting between the three guarantor powers, Turkey, Greece and Britain ,and the two leaders - where not only the guarantee issue but also headed by territorial aspects, property and governance issues would be finalized in a comprehensive give-and-take process guided by the principle that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed."

Over many months of talks, indeed, Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akıncı and his Greek Cypriot counterpart have come very close to closing four of the six chapters to reach a comprehensive resolution of the Cyprus problem. Was that a great success? Unfortunately not, because on all those subjects, more or less, there have been various forms of rapprochement between the two sides many times in the past, be it in the Hugo Gobbi Ideas of 1989 or the Boutros Boutros-Ghali Set of Ideas in 1992 or the failed Kofi Annan Plan of April 2004. None of those competencies developed, unfortunately, could constitute the backbone of a settlement of the Cyprus problem on the basis of a federal cohabitation of the numerically larger Greek Cypriot and smaller Turkish Cypriot co-inhabitant peoples of the eastern Mediterranean island.

As former...