UN Secretary General confident Cyprus issue will be solved by yearend

PanARMENIAN.Net - UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has urged the Cyprus leaders to move forward to the “endgame of negotiations” over the following two months, calling a new three-way summit for January.

“The sides have made some encouraging progress during these two days on some of the remaining core issues,” Ban yesterday told reporters at UN headquarters, flanked by Cyprus President Demetris Christofias and Turkish Cypriot leader Dervis Eroglu.

“This has given me confidence that a comprehensive settlement can be achieved. Both leaders have assured me that they believe that they can finalise a deal,” he added.

The leaders met Ban and senior UN officials in Long Island, New York on Sunday and Monday, the fourth such summit with the UN chief as part of ongoing reunification talks.

Despite the progress made, the UN chief acknowledged that “there is still work to be done”. He said both leaders agreed that further efforts are essential over the next two months “to move to the end game of the negotiations”.

In a time-urgent message to the two sides, Ban said that by January he expects the internal aspects of the Cyprus problem to have been resolved “so that we can move to the multilateral conference shortly thereafter,” Cyprus Mail reported.