Kozakou-Marcoullis to The Levant Files: Cyprus Stands “A Mile From a Solution” — but Time, and Political Will, May Be Running Out

Dr. Nikolaos Stelgias

In an exclusive interview with The Levant Files, Dr. Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis — former Minister of Foreign Affairs and former Minister of Communications and Works of the Republic of Cyprus — delivers a sober diplomatic reading of the present moment, warning that, absent genuine political will, the island risks drifting irreversibly toward partition.

Speaking exclusively to The Levant Files, one of Cyprus’s most experienced diplomats offered a measured but unmistakably cautious assessment of suggestions that the island may be approaching a new and final phase in the search for a settlement.

‘A Mile From the Solution’

Asked whether the government’s signals of an imminent “final process” reflect a realistic prospect or merely a pious aspiration, the former Foreign Minister was careful not to inflate expectations. The UN Secretary-General, she noted, has achieved little of substance since the intense early months of his tenure in Geneva and Crans-Montana, and would understandably wish to leave his successor something to build on. Yet the clock, she warned, is against him: “the minimal time that remains does not leave the necessary margins” for such a breakthrough.

Her frame of reference is consistent throughout: Crans-Montana in 2017, where the two sides came, in her words, “a mile only from the solution.” The convergences accumulated over years of talks, together with the six-point framework tabled by the Secretary-General on 30 June 2017, offered a genuine opportunity to bridge the remaining gaps — had the will existed. It did not. “Unfortunately, the political will did not exist, and our side chose to follow a very negative stance during the dinner of 6–7 July 2017,” she said, “which finally led the Secretary-General — very wrongly, in my view — to declare the termination of the conference.”

If negotiations were to resume from precisely that point, Kozakou-Marcoullis believes a strategic agreement need not take long. But she voiced serious doubts that the will exists today. Since the election of the new Turkish Cypriot leader, she observed, she had seen nothing to suggest the two sides were ready to take the hard decisions a settlement requires. “Over the last eight months we have seen hesitancy, foot-dragging and procrastination,” she said, “even over the opening of a single crossing point, with time passing and no substantial change to the scenery of stagnation and deadlock.”

No New Plan, but a Road Map

On the warning issued by former Turkish Cypriot negotiator Özdil Nami — that a fresh UN attempt to draft an entirely new plan could prove dangerous, precisely because the convergences are already in place — the former Minister said she fully shared his concern. The raw material for a comprehensive settlement, she insisted, already exists in the agreed convergences and the Secretary-General’s framework. “It would be extremely dangerous to reopen for renegotiation convergences that were achieved after years of negotiations and the efforts of previous Secretaries-General and leaders,” she cautioned. Since 2008, she reminded, the process has been defined as Cypriot-owned and free of outside imposition; the Secretary-General therefore has no authority to convert his mandate of good offices into mediation “without the agreement of the two sides and without a new Security Council resolution.” A wholly new plan overturning core convergences, she said, is “a completely far-fetched scenario.”

What she would welcome, however, is something more carefully calibrated. Nine years after the last framework, the Secretary-General could, she suggested, legitimately propose a two-part Road Map. “One part would concern the substance, with a renewed and improved framework for reaching a strategic agreement, and a second part would concern the methodology,” she explained — the latter designed to ease, though not wholly satisfy, Turkish Cypriot concerns, “because otherwise the whole balance, and the prospect of mutual acceptance of the Road Map, would be overturned.” Crucially, she tied progress to Turkey’s European trajectory, arguing that Ankara’s constructive engagement should be linked, “in a synchronised and interlinked way,” to tangible EU incentives: modernisation of the Customs Union, visa liberalisation, and closer association with European defence initiatives such as SAFE.

‘There Is No Other Choice’: The Case for Federation

The former Minister reserved her sharpest disagreement for the increasingly fashionable rejectionist formula — “any dialogue is welcome, but no return to failed processes and to federation as discussed at Crans-Montana.” This, she said bluntly, reflects “ignorance of the federal system and a lack of realism.” For her the choice is stark: “For me there is no other choice than the federal solution. Either we agree on a federal solution, or we consciously accept a two-state solution, which in my view will be catastrophic for Cyprus itself and its future.” A return to the unitary state of 1960 is impossible, she noted, as is any military reversal of the occupation.

The bizonal, bicommunal federation — agreed between the two communities as far back as 1977 and endorsed in successive Security Council resolutions — remains, she argued, not merely the only feasible outcome but the ideal one. “Each community will have its own region, where, through its own government, its own legislature and its own courts, it will exercise most of the competences that concern the daily life of citizens — education, employment, health, social security, culture,” she explained, while a limited set of powers, satisfying the principles of a single sovereignty, single international personality and single citizenship, such as foreign policy, defence, the economy, monetary policy, natural resources, migration and citizenship, would rest with a shared federal government in which the two communities decide jointly, on the basis of political equality.

Beyond the architecture of governance, she pointed to two further pillars on which the sides had made real headway: the territorial chapter, where the exchange of maps in Geneva in January 2017 brought them close to agreement, and the question of security and guarantees, substantially recast by the June 2017 framework and by a non-paper — tabled at the fateful July dinner — that would have replaced the outdated Treaty of Guarantee with a mechanism to monitor the implementation of a settlement. The fault, she stressed, lies not with the federal model but with “the lack of decisiveness to take the great decisions” a settlement demands, after more than half a century of a problem that continues to deny Cypriots a normal state.

The Four Preconditions — and the Concerning Fourth

Turning to the four preconditions set by Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhürman for entering substantive talks, Kozakou-Marcoullis drew a careful distinction. Two of them — on political equality and on commitment to the convergences — she considered broadly acceptable. The demand for a strict timetable she found only “somewhat problematic”: negotiations should not be endless, she conceded, yet an automatic expiry date raises hard questions about who would judge whether a party was negotiating in good faith or simply running down the clock, “and by what criteria.”

Her gravest concern was to the fourth condition — that, should the Greek Cypriot side abandon the table or reject a plan at referendum, the Turkish Cypriots should not be required to return to the present status quo. The implied consequences, she warned, run “from the lifting of the so-called isolation of the Turkish Cypriots — through direct trade, direct flights and direct contacts — all the way to the prospect of recognition of the ‘TRNC.’” Her verdict was unequivocal: “This fourth precondition leads, if not directly then at least obliquely, to partition and to the two-state solution, something which, for me, must be avoided at all costs.”

The danger, as she framed it, is one of misplaced energy. “Our sole aim must be how we achieve the reunification of our common homeland through a federal solution,” she said. “If we exhaust ourselves in advance discussing what will happen in the event of a possible ‘no,’ and what the details of a divorce would be, then any incentive for reunification will vanish, and we will end up focused on the divorce, or on partition — which, I repeat, is for me the worst scenario.”

What ‘Status Quo’ Really Means

As a signatory of the September 2024 joint declaration between the Cyprus Peace and Dialogue Center and the Decision-Peace initiative, she said she remained bound by what Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots had agreed together: “However, this time must be different. The negotiations should resume in a phased, meaningful and results-oriented manner with a mechanism agreed by the parties for resolving possible impasses, leading to a comprehensive settlement agreement that would be submitted for the approval of both communities in separate, simultaneous referenda. As the continuation of the status-quo is unacceptable and unsustainable, it should not be among possible outcomes. The consequences of a new failure should be made clear to both sides”. That paragraph, she noted pointedly, contains no mention of strict timetables, of arbitration, or of recognition of the “TRNC.”

And the status quo, she insisted, is not merely the condition of the Turkish Cypriot community, but “the continuing Turkish military occupation, the continuing division and the continuing political abnormality in the governance of the Republic of Cyprus” in place since December 1963. She closed the point by invoking the Secretary-General’s own report to the Security Council of 22 November 1993, which defined precisely the status quo the Council deems unacceptable: “The status quo that the Security Council has deemed to be unacceptable was established through the use of force and is sustained by military strength. Such a status quo is not viable in the long term.”

A Warning for 2028

Her final assessment was the bleakest. Asked whether the Greek Cypriot side — as the 2028 electoral cycle opens and the governing Right “flirts” with the far-right ELAM — is ready to contemplate a new compromise, she was unsparing. Conditions that were already difficult have grown harder still: most of the government partners of President Nikos Christodoulides, she noted, either reject bizonal, bicommunal federation outright or harbour deep reservations about the convergences, and ELAM has now risen to become the third parliamentary force. She recalled “how many times the solution of the Cyprus problem has ended up being the real victim of electoral and party expediencies, chiefly in periods of presidential elections.”

Should the pro-solution forces fail to unite around a settlement as their first and highest priority, she warned, the outcome this time would be “catastrophic.” Her closing words to The Levant Files read less as analysis than as a warning issued while there is still time: “If the political forces of the solution do not unite, setting aside their differences, and if we do not finally place the solution of the Cyprus problem as our first and highest goal, then I very much fear that fifty years from now we will still be discussing a fair solution of the Cyprus problem — while the occupied areas will already have been integrated into Turkey and fully Turkified.”

Illustation: Gemini Nano Banana 2