It’s hard to find optimism in the Cyprus dilemma.
WITH TRUMP, PUTIN AND ERDOGAN, IT’S NO WONDER IT’S HARD TO FIND OPTIMISM
If it were up to the people of this otherwise idyllic Mediterranean Island, the barbed wire, watchtowers and United Nations checkpoints that have kept Cyprus divided against itself for the past 43 years would have been gone by now.
As recently as January, there was great hope that the self- inflicted wounds from the inter- communal bloodletting of the 1960s and 1970s had sufficiently healed. Everyone seemed certain that Ankara, London, Moscow and Athens were no longer determined to keep Cypriots at one another’s throats.
Greek Cypriot leader Nicos Anastasiades and his Turki sh Cypriot counterpart, Mustafa Akinci, were on the friendliest terms. The United Nations and the European Union were dismantling obstacles in the way of the island’s reunification. Everybody was on the same page: The future of Cyprus would be a democratic federated republic, with its ancient Christian and Muslim communities enjoying political equality.
It is not as though everyone’s just given up, but there is no longer much of a spring in the step of Cypriot optimists. While the gloom can’t be pinned on a single cause or culprit, the mood started to turn sour on Friday, Jan. 13, in Istanbul. When questioned about the future of Turkey’s 35,000 troops, which have been illegally occupying the northern third of Cyprus since 1974, Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan answered: “Turkey will be in Cyprus forever.” Things have gone downhill ever since.
After imposing a state of emergency last year following a coup attempt, Erdogan has pushed through consti- tutional amendments that have enabled him to metamorphose from a loutish and bullying president into a kind of paranoid neo- Ottoman sultan. He has imprisoned nearly 50,000 people, mostly teachers, journalists, judges and opposition politicians, and his foreign- policy conduct is becoming increasingly erratic.
Over the past three weeks, Erdogan has dispatched naval frigates to conduct “military exercises” in Cypriot waters and harass Cypriot vessels undertaking seismic research off the Cypriot coast, within the Cyprus Exclusive Economic Zone. The Cypriot government this week told UN Secretary- General Antonio Guterres that Erdogan’s conduct threatens to sabotage reunification talks overseen by the UN’s Espen Barth Eide, who is rapidly losing the confidence of the Cypriot government.
Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias had previously complained that Eide is biased in favour of the Turks, and President Anastasiades appears to have come around to that point of view. “Eide should understand that statements or threats will produce results contrary to the goal of reunifying Cyprus ... the less is said, especially on his ( Eide’s) part, the better,” Anastasiades said this week. Cypriot opposition politicians are demanding that Eide be removed from his UN post altogether.
The Russians aren’t exactly helping. The Kremlin has been meddling in Cypriot affairs for decades, with a view to complicating matters for NATO. Vladimir Putin’s gangster state has been making a nuisance of itself at least as far back as 2009, when a UN investigation implicated Moscow in an emailhacking scandal designed to incite anti- reunification sentiment. For all its successes in attracting tourists to build up its economy, the new direct flights from Moscow have been bringing on more than just holidaymakers. Cyprus is fast becoming a hub for Russian money- laundering and subterfuge, and with the United States presidency now in the clutches of Donald Trump, Cypriots know only too well that they can’t count on the Americans if they find themselves in a jam.
Just how Cyprus ended up in this predicament is a long and bloody tangle that Canada has invested a great deal in unravelling, not least the lives of 28 Canadian Forces peacekeepers over the years. First dispatched by the UN in 1964 to put down intercommunal killings in a mission that was supposed to last three months, Canadian soldiers stayed on until 1993, when Canada’s participation was wound down. There are still about 1,000 UN troops on Cyprus, mostly patrolling the 1974 “green line” between the territory controlled by the internationally- recognized Republic of Cyprus and the northern third of the island, which was invaded and occupied by Turkish troops that year.
What often gets left out of the story is that the Turkish invasion wasn’t the only earth- shattering event that occurred in 1974. Retaking its former Ottoman-era possession ( or at least annexing the northern third of the island) had been a Turkish intention for decades prior to 1974, but the pretext for its invasion that year was another event that occurred a few weeks earlier that same summer — a Greek military overthrow of the democratically-elected government of Archbishop Makarios II, the first president of the Republic of Cyprus, which won its independence from colonial Britain in 1960.
The UN quickly came to the aid of the republic — the debacle of the coup would prove the undoing of the Greek military dictatorship in Athens, in the bargain — but Turkey invaded anyway. The fighting resulted in tens of thousands of Turkish Cypriots fleeing north, and tens of thousands of Greek Cypriots fleeing south. The truce line that brought the worst hostilities to a close was drawn straight through Nicosia — a city with two time zones now, one Turkish and the other Greek.
The Republic of Cyprus is a prosperous EU-affiliated UN member state. The northern third of the island has been the self- declared “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus,” recognized by no one but Turkey, since 1983. Greek Cypriots are deeply resentful of this state of affairs. Turkish Cypriots aren’t happy with it, either.. The challenge has been to cobble together a reunification plan that suits Cypriots on both sides of the green line and not just the foreign powers — Greece included — that have always manipulated negotiations to suit their foreign-policy interests.
Cypriots came close to a deal in 2004, but it collapsed, owing to its terms being tilted so favourably to the Turkish side. Known as the “Annan plan,” after former UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan, the 2004 arrangement for a confederated Cypriot Republic was approved by the 300,000 or so Turkish Cypriots (half of whom were Turks who had taken up Ankara’s post-1974 offers to emigrate to its illegal colony) by 64 per cent. Voters in the Cypriot Republic, with its population of about 800,000, voted 75 per cent against the deal, however. It’s not hard to see why.
The 2004 arrangement would have afforded Turkey the right of unilateral military intervention in Cyprus, allowed Turkey to retain its garrison of troops on the island, and absolved Turkey of accountability for its 1974 invasion and the bloodshed that followed. The way Greek Cypriots saw it, the northern statelet would have remained subject to Turkish sovereignty, and the deal unfairly granted the “Turkish” fifth of the population half the seats in the senate and half of the Cypriot supreme court.
The EU, the UN and especially the United States expressed much dismay over the vote result.
Reunification talks were revived in 2008, however, and they stumble along. Whether the talks will survive Erdogan, or Putin, is a question you won’t find many Cypriots betting on.