Cyprus-Forum.com

[EPSILON]

We must not let political blindness triumph in Cyprus again
by
ÖZDEM SANBERK*

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband (L), following talks with Ahmet Davutoğlu on Wednesday, said that 2009 was the year for a settlement in Cyprus, which has been divided for more than three decades.
The Cyprus dispute is generally regarded as a minor sideshow in international politics. When Turks or Greeks argue it out, the rest of the world tends to assume that it is a case of two intransigent sides, with “six of one side and half a dozen of the other.”





But there are other ways of looking at it. For many but perhaps not all Greeks, it is a bid to recapture lands which belong to the Greek world. We have the mirror image of this. For many people, perhaps not only in Turkey, the dispute is the final stage in a great and largely successful drive to expel Muslims from the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The rhetoric of some Greek Orthodox churchmen over Cyprus and Turkey, something which Turks and Muslims pay more attention to than Western Europeans do, unfortunately makes that impression stronger. They seem not to accept a plural community of Christians and Muslims living on equal terms in peace. So, when it comes to the bottom line, the issue is whether the Turkish Cypriots can go on living on the island and do so in security -- something which was not possible for their co-religionists in Greece and much of the Balkans.
Cyprus originally became independent as part of an agreed deal between Britain, Turkey and Greece for power sharing between its two national communities. The deal broke down in just over two years. Turks (and a few good independent observers) thought the Greek Cypriots were trying to subordinate them. Greeks thought the Turks were refusing to be cooperative. The first division in Cyprus began when the Turkish community retreated behind barricades. They remained there for 11 years until the Sampson coup, inspired by Athens, forced Turkey to intervene amid massacres of Turkish Cypriots.


British Foreign Secretary David Miliband (L), following talks with Ahmet Davutoğlu on Wednesday, said that 2009 was the year for a settlement in Cyprus, which has been divided for more than three decades.


At that point in 1974, the island was cut in two by a Turkish intervention (carried out in accordance with the treaty) and the Turkish Cypriots became a small but definitely self-governing nation, under the military protection of Turkey -- but not under mainland Turkish rule. This central point is invariably misrepresented in Greek Cypriot propaganda. Of course it has to be. If you see the Turkish Cypriots as a small nationality, like say the Slovenes, the Montenegrins, the Maltese and the Greek Cypriots, then logically they are entitled to self-government, something which they have in fact had for 35 years now and are now being asked to give up. But a cardinal doctrine of the Western world is that the Turkish Cypriots are not entitled to self-determination or secession. To try and get them to accept that they cannot be independent, the EU has imposed sanctions and isolation on the Turkish Cypriots very similar to those it used to bring colonial white minorities to heel in Africa, regardless of the different circumstances.

The cost of these policies has been immense. Turkey's place in the Western world has been stretched to the breaking point. Poisonous racist attitudes toward the Turks have become a feature of public debates in Europe. And the EU adopted the 700,000 Greek Cypriots, giving them full rights in the EU, even though they had voted against the EU's own peace deal and denied EU commissioners the right to explain the situation on Greek Cypriot television. By doing so, the EU plunged its own relations with Turkey into a more or less permanent crisis, despite Turkey's much greater importance to the union in every way. Some might think that this was not a very smart move by the union and hardly in the interests of most of its citizens.

Southern Cyprus was admitted to the EU largely because the union turned a blind eye to its own rules and decided that a country where the population of nearly 40 percent of its territory rejected rule by the central government nevertheless possessed political stability and met the Copenhagen criteria.

But everyone agrees that a country that is half in and half out of the EU is an absurd situation. So, as in 2003-4, the EU is once more trying to broker a settlement. But it has paid almost no attention to the hard-line statements coming from the Greek Cypriots over the last year.

The political will for a settlement exists both in Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (KKTC) as the people at the helm are the same people who championed settlement in 2004, including Turkish President Abdullah Gül, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and KKTC President Mehmet Ali Talat. They want a settlement and -- particularly in mainland Turkey -- they do not face very significant political obstacles in trying to propose one. A decade or two ago, hard-line nationalist opinion was an obstacle to a Cyprus peace deal, but no longer.

For us in Turkey, the Cyprus issue is not -- whatever others may think -- about territory or territorial expansion. The Turkish mainland's interest in Cyprus relates to finding security and reasonable prosperity for the Turkish Cypriots and maintaining good neighborly relations and ties of friendship between Turkey and mainland Greece, as at present and in the past. Turkey wants good relations with Athens. We believe this will guarantee the security balance between the two countries in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean established with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 and reaffirmed with the Zurich and London treaties in 1959-60.

So if there was a convincing settlement in Cyprus, both Turkey's government and people would be delighted. There would be an enormous sigh of relief that one of the difficulties we face as a country was out of the way. Few people would be against it -- especially if they could be confident that the deal was realistic and durable and did not contain the seeds of future collapse and new conflict.

In 2004, a Cyprus solution looked like a big carrot in Ankara, opening the way for Turkish EU membership. Not any more. In 2009, the Turkish public very largely lost faith in the EU and Europe. The prospect of EU accession has largely faded, given the clear messages from Germany's Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Still it remains clear that a successful settlement in Cyprus would benefit everyone. But there isn't going to be one if the goal posts have been moved. The major issue is how to overcome the Greek Cypriots' lack of will to engage in power sharing with the Turks on the island.

The essential elements of a settlement in Turkish eyes (confirmed in UN negotiations) have always been political equality, i.e., equal and not minority status for Turkish Cyprus, expressed in a two-state federal system. Given that the Turkish Cypriots have governed themselves for nearly 40 years, it is unrealistic to assume that they could accept less than that. During the last year, the Greek Cypriots have used language that suggests that they still think in terms of an essentially unitary Greek state with a Turkish minority. President Talat, elected on a program of negotiations and reunion, has often sounded close to despair as his Greek interlocutors undermined his plans.

Because we all need to be sure that the settlement will not be a “house of cards” to be blown down by the first political winds, following a settlement, there must be a completely new era in Turkish-Greek Cypriot relations and the end of old feuds and attacks on Turkey. That can only happen if there is an explicit intention and the means to do so. And it must be something the Turkish Cypriots can enforce. Would the Turkish Cypriots have a veto on the Greek Cypriot veto against Turkey in the EU, for example?

Otherwise, there is a horrible possibility that the EU would have an ethnic war inside one of its member states and that there might be a re-run of the events of Christmas 1962 on the island, when the two sides began fighting. That would be a much greater crisis for the EU than any it has ever faced and would largely be the product of its own miscalculations and unwillingness to face up to realities.

Let us hope these horrible scenarios never come to pass. But unless the Greek Cypriots are told firmly that they must live with the Turkish Cypriots as full equals and fellow citizens, the current peace initiatives will look more than a little naive.

The eastern Mediterranean is already a region flawed by instabilities. Both sides -- not just one -- stand to lose if there is no settlement. New conflicts and insecurities would be added to old ones, for the dispute might be wider than just Cyprus. All the problems Turkey and Greece are now facing in the Aegean will be transposed to the eastern Mediterranean, e.g., issues such as territorial waters and seabed rights, where some Greeks appear to be trying to steal a march on their Turkish neighbors. This is an avoidable disaster. All of us who want to see the eastern Mediterranean become a sea of peace need to work together, but perhaps Britain and America in particular will bear special responsibility for seeing that what is on offer is a peace deal that is fair and works.

If they cannot design one, who then can say whether Cyprus will ever be reunited -- and whether the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea will not become expensive foreign policy liabilities for the EU.


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Turkish corner of view.Two states - Goodluck to us.