The parties involved in the Cyprus unification talks met a Tuesday midday deadline to respond to the revised peace plan, presented Monday by the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.  

All four parties -- the Turkish and Greek delegations as well as the Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot negotiators -- raised objections to the plan, but Turkish Cypriots and Turkey seem more satisfied than their Greek Cypriot counterparts with the blueprint, which is Annan's last-ditch effort in reuniting Cyprus before it joins the European Union on May 1.

"There are signs of rapprochement but the negotiations obviously must continue," said a spokesman for EU enlargement commissioner Guenter Verheugen, who met with the parties on Tuesday and was to head to Strasbourg later in the day to assess progress with EU officials.

The UN team is currently taking the parties' objections into account for preparing a final settlement text, and the four parties have until Wednesday to agree on a plan which may end the 30-year division of Cyprus.

"We have handed over a text setting out our positions ... we are reaching a crucial phase," a Turkish diplomat was cited by local media as saying.

"We're working meticulously, with determination and prudence," Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a written statement. "We want a positive result here, with a win-win approach."

If the sides fail to reach agreement on the plan by Wednesday, Annan has a mandate to fill in any disputed gaps. Either way, the plan -- which runs to 9,000 pages of proposed laws for a loose confederation of two ethnic zones -- will go to separate referenda in the two Cypriot communities on April 20.

Cyprus has remained divided into the Turkish-Cypriot north and the Greek-Cypriot south since 1974, when Turkish troops entered the north of the island after a failed Greek-Cypriot coup seeking union with Greece.

Negotiations between Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots, under the UN auspices, resumed last month in Nicosia, capital of Cyprus, but failed to achieve any result in the first phase that ended on March 22.

The second phase of the talks switched to Switzerland on March 24 with the participation of the Greek and Turkish leaders.

(Xinhua News Agency March 31, 2004)