NICOSIA, Feb. 9 (Xinhua) -- Cypriot community leaders have agreed to start negotiations on outstanding issues, Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades said on Thursday.
This means the two sides will start talks on outstanding issues, with Greek Cypriots consenting to more powers for the Turkish Cypriot minority in exchange for territory currently occupied by Turkish troops.
Turkey occupied 37 percent of Cypriot territory in a 1974 operation sparked by a coup engineered by the military rulers of Greece at that time.
"Based on groundwork done by our negotiators, we have started a dialogue to see how we convert most of the remaining differences into convergences," said Anastasiades, who represents the Greek Cypriot community in negotiations with Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinci.
"Discussions will be made interdependently on the different chapters so as to reach the maximum possible convergences on the base of what we have agreed in the past, before the conference on Cyprus," he added.
He said both sides started on Thursday with the issue of governance, on which "there has been a relative progress," though much work still remains to be done.
Sources said that the progress related to the definition of powers of a central weak federal government that is designed to allow the two sides to run their own affairs.
Anastasiades said a conference of the two Cypriots sides along with the guarantor countries Greece, Turkey and Britain will be possibly reconvened in Geneva after March 13.
He also said that UN Secretary General's special adviser on Cyprus Espen Barth Eide briefed them on the talks he had in Athens and Ankara.
"The general picture is that the intention of the parties involved is to reach an agreement as soon as possible, but this has to be verified at the negotiations table. We do not rest on assertions," said Anastasiades.
He had earlier said that the next stage of the Geneva conference, after a failed attempt in January, will also be at foreign ministers level.
"I do not expect that a conference on that level will be the end of the road," he said.
