NICOSIA, June 25 (Xinhua) -- United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres is set to soon appoint a personal envoy to consult with all parties involved in the Cyprus problem on restarting peace negotiations, the spokesman of the UN mission in Cyprus, Aleem Sidique, said on Monday.
"As the Secretary General has made clear in his last report, he intends to appoint a senior UN official in the coming weeks to conduct consultations with all the parties. For the UN that will be the next step," Sidique said in replying to a question on the next steps on Cyprus by the secretary general following the completion of the electoral process in Turkey.
Negotiations on Cyprus, which have been going on for about four decades, ended in disagreement in July 2017, over security arrangements after a solution and the terms of power sharing between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.
Guterres said in a report to the Security Council earlier this month that the parties must agree on a six-point framework he set out during the last meeting of the parties in Switzerland.
Cypriot government spokesman Prodromos Prodromou said that now that the elections in Turkey are over "it is time to hear what Ankara has to say on the resumption of the Cyprus peace talks."
Cyprus's government run only by Greek Cypriots after Turkish Cypriots set up their own breakaway state in the part of the island controlled by Turkish troops, has said that it notified the Secretary General of its consent for an envoy to probe how negotiations could restart.
"We would like to see if anything has changed in relation to public statements on the part of Turkey and whether negotiations can resume given the fact that Turkey expressed its intention to move away from the UN framework," Prodromou said.
Cyrpus' Foreign Minister Nicos Christodoulides had earlier said that the government hoped that Turkey would give its consent for continuing negotiations after Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was re-elected.
