Cyprus rivals still far apart after rare talks

NICOSIA (AFP) — Rival Greek- and Turkish-Cypriot leaders held a rare face-to-face meeting on Wednesday, but in three and a half hours of talks they failed to make headway on ending the island's 33-year division.

Neither Cyprus President Tassos Papadopoulos nor Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat took reporters' questions after the encounter on neutral ground in the UN-patrolled buffer zone.

And in separate press conferences on home soil afterwards, the two leaders spelt out their continuing sharp differences over the best way forward after Papadopoulos led Greek Cypriot voters in rejecting a UN reunification plan in 2004.

UN mission chief Michael Moeller, who hosted the meeting at his residence, issued a brief and carefully worded statement praising the "constructive atmosphere" of the talks.

But he was unable even to announce a date for a new meeting.

The two leaders "agreed to continue their contacts through the United Nations and to meet again when appropriate," he said.

Afterwards, the two men revealed that they had disagreed sharply over how to implement the twin-track process they had thrashed out at their last meeting in July 2006.

Papadopoulos made clear that he considered the technical committees foreseen by that agreement as vital to preparing the way for effective negotiations on the substantive issues involved in reuniting the island.

Talat countered that that was a pretext for delay and that he had detected no willingness on the Greek Cypriot side to get down to serious talks.

Papadopoulos, who faces a re-election battle next February in which his two main challengers have traditionally been stronger supporters of reunification, accused the Turkish Cypriot leader of wanting a "variation" from what had been agreed in July.

"He wants talks to continue immediately without the committees, or for the role of the committees to be limited to a purely technical level of listing the headings to be discussed," Papadopoulos charged.

He warned that any shortcircuiting of the preparatory committees would "not speed up the process but lead us quickly to the realisation that we have reached deadlock."

But Talat, who led Turkish Cypriots in supporting the 2004 reunification plan by a wide margin, accused Papadopoulos of blocking any move to accelerate the pace of negotiations to counter a mounting slide towards permanent partition.

"We observed that there was no psychological preparedness for the opening of comprehensive negotiations," Talat said.

He said he ready to enter such talks "tomorrow" and had even proposed a timetable to complete the work of the preparatory committees by late November to pave the way for a comprehensive settlement by the end of next year.

"But they rejected any time limit."

Former colonial power Britain, which retains two sovereign military base areas on the island, has also expressed mounting frustration with the pace of reunification efforts.

"We very much hope that those talks will be entered into with real openness and determination on both sides," Foreign Secretary David Miliband said ahead of Wednesday's meeting.

The Greek Cypriot vote in the 2004 referendum meant that Cyprus joined the European Union later that year still a divided island.

EU law does not extend to the breakaway north of the island, which is recognized only by Ankara, meaning that Turkish Cypriots are denied the full benefits of the island's membership.

Cyprus has been divided along ethnic lines since 1974 when Turkish troops invaded its northern third following a Greek Cypriot coup aimed at uniting the island with Greece.