CopperLine wrote:Boomerang,
Thanks for the speedy reply.
You wrote that the,
proposal is only equal to one side of the triangle, because it does not address a return to normality
I know, but the point is that in all the time that it will take to return to normality (if ever) the pernicious and threatening aspects of a military presence (of whatever kind, from wherever, whether 'legal' or 'illegal') could be dealt with.
I suppose that there are two broad schools of thought, each which has adherents from all sides of the debate. One school of thought holds that any settlement must be
comprehensive thereby addressing all aspects of the division - human rights, land, property, compensation, right of return, foreign military presence, constitution and so on and so forth. Many people in this school want nothing short of a single, final and comprehensive settlement. Fair enough.
A second school of thought, again with adherents from all sides, maintains that not only can more progress be made through a piece by piece, maybe sector by sector, issue by issue approach, but that such an approach would also hasten and smooth the path for a comprehensive settlement.
In that light, my suggestion for demilitarisation is firmly from within the second school. It doesn't pretend to address, say, the question of right to return, or property compensation, nor does it seek to determine what is legal or illegal. What it seeks to do is ease the current sources of insecurity for all in just this one field, the military question.
removing the troops back to turkey alone does not mean turkey will not pull the strings...this is the problem..
I agree. My thinking behind the demilitarisation proposal is that - to put it crudely - one is caling Turkey's bluff. If Turkey's justification for troop presence is the perceived threat to TRNC and TCs from RoC and GCs - and this is what Turkey says itself, and that justification is what TCs many often invoke, and what many GCs are confronted with - then removal of the grounds for Turkey's justification then puts Turkey on the spot, including internationally. The obverse applies, albeit differently, to the RoC armed forces (no, I am not making T and RoC armned forces morally, legally or politically equivalent). A different argument applies for the British sovereign bases insofar as they have never (?) been justified in terms of threats from within Cyprus or even to Cyprus.
Turkey needs to let go off Cyprus...something she is unwilling to do, and continously shooting her self in the foot...
Again I agree. But restating the problem doesn't resolve it. Our problem is how we get from A to B. A we don't like but that's where we are; B we like but we're not there. Can we make some progress toward reaching B without a comprehensive settlement ? I supect that we can, here are some tentative and partial suggestions.
As far as I can see things, so long as the comprehensive settlement is the 'only game in town' we're not likely to get anywhere. Annan was as close to a comprehensive proposal as we're likely to get and it seems that it is dead in the water. The reality is that there is a de facto partition which seems - whether for good reason or bad, whether intentionally or unintentionally - likely to continue for the forseeable future. We can either say 'so be it' and resign ourselves to that, or we can try to thinks of ways to break the log-jam.