Erhurman announces Cyprus problem negotiating team

Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman late on Wednesday night published a photograph of his Cyprus problem negotiating team following what he described as a “preparatory meeting” with them.

Alongside Erhurman in the photograph were five people: Mehmet Dana, Seniha Birand, Ipek Borman, Cise Zekai Faruk and Ali Tuncay.

Mehmet Dana is Erhurman’s undersecretary and has already featured heavily in talks held since Erhurman’s election in October, holding meetings with Greek Cypriot chief negotiator Menelaos Menelaou.

Prior to that, he had served in former Turkish Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat’s negotiating team and was a career diplomat, spending five years as the Turkish Cypriot representative in New York.

Seniha Birand is also a long-serving diplomat, and first appeared on a Turkish Cypriot negotiating team in 1999, under late Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash, while also working on the team which negotiated the Annan plan.

More recently, she was charged with coordinating confidence-building measures and bicommunal technical committees for the Turkish Cypriot side.

Ipek Borman is an academic who has worked at three universities in the north – the Near East University, the Cyprus International University, and the Eastern Mediterranean University – and also served on the negotiating teams of both Mehmet Ali Talat and former Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci.

She was appointed last month as an advisor to Erhurman.

Cise Zekai Faruk began her career in marketing and spent eight years working for Reuters, before later joining the north’s ‘foreign ministry’, beginning her time in the public sector as an archive officer.

Ali Tuncay has served as the Turkish Cypriot co-chairman of the bicommunal technical committee on cultural heritage since 2008.

The meeting comes with Erhurman having said that he expects United Nations envoy Maria Angela Holguin to return to Cyprus this month, with a fresh enlarged meeting set to take place in the weeks that follow.

At the time, he said that an enlarged meeting, which would bring together the island’s two sides, its three guarantor powers, Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom, and the UN, “should not be held without prior agreements on certain issues in Nicosia”.

With Holguin set to arrive on the island next month, he said it would be “more appropriate” for an enlarged meeting to be held after her visit to the island, “if concrete progress is made during these contacts”.

He also remains resolute on his four points for negotiations to recommence in earnest.

Those four points, sometimes referred to as “preconditions” – a term Erhurman resents – foresee that the Greek Cypriot side accept political equality, time-limit negotiations, and preserve all past agreements, and that the UN guarantee that embargoes placed on the Turkish Cypriots be lifted if the Greek Cypriot side leaves the negotiating table again.