UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Tuesday met separately with Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders in a renewed effort to end the 26-year-old partition of the Mediterranean island.
Neither Greek Cypriot President Glafcos Clerides nor Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash made any comment to the press, adhering to a media blackout requested by the United Nations.
"I believe the time has come to move ahead," Annan said in a statement addressed to both parties.
He said that for the purpose of expediting the negotiations, he had concluded "that the equal status of the parties must and should be recognized explicitly in the comprehensive settlement."
The current round of UN-mediated negotiations is the fourth since last December. All three previous ones have failed to move beyond even procedural disputes.
UN spokesman Fred Eckhard said Monday that Annan hoped the talks this time could be more substantive than in the past and move to territorial and constitutional issues.
However, Denktash has always insisted on official recognition for his breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, currently recognized only by Turkey, as a precondition for opening substantive talks on the Cyprus problem.
The UN envoy for Cyprus, Alvaro de Soto, said that at the moment, UN officials would not press for a face-to-face meeting between Denktash and Clerides.
"Perhaps, at the appropriate moment, that may be required," he said. "But in the meantime we don't view that as a necessity nor are we pressing for it."
Cyprus has been divided into a Turkish-controlled north and Greek-controlled south since 1974, when Turkey occupied its northern third in response to an Athens-engineered coup seeking to unite Cyprus with Greece - UNITED NATIONS (AFP)
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