Cyprus gets ready to assume Presidency
By Christophe Midol-Monnet in Cyprus | Thursday 31 May 2012
On 1 July, the Island of Cyprus will take up the Presidency of the EU Council for the very first time. But will this exercise change the situation in this divided member state and encourage reconciliation between the Greek and Turkish communities? Europoliticscarried out an investigation on the other side of the Green Line, the buffer zone that cuts the island, including its capital Nicosia, in two.
Canan Onurer,aged 27, is a journalist and secretary-general of Basin Sen, the Turkish Cypriot press workers’ union. She presents the news every morning on Radyo Mayisin Nicosia. All is well in the life of this young mother, until she is asked about her identity: “My mother is Turkish. She was born in Istanbul. But I’m not Turkish. I’m a Turkish Cypriot. I’m Cypriot but I speak Turkish. And that is where the problem lies. It’s what we call the Cypriot problem”.
Canan was not born when the Cypriot problem began. After the end of the British colonial administration and the country’s independence in 1960, the Turkish and Greek communities experienced years of endemic tension. In response to a coup attempt meant to annex the island to Greece, under the military dictatorship at the time, Ankara sent troops to occupy the Northern part of the island in 1974. Both sides barricaded themselves in and counted the missing and the refugees. It was not until 1983 that the self-declared Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) came into existence. This entity is recognised by Turkey alone, but has never been recognised by the rest of the international community. Under the auspices of the United Nations, whose blue helmets patrol the Green Line, negotiations for reunification within a single state made up of two zones and two communities have been under way for a long time. The latest settlement proposal, the 2003 Annan plan, was approved overwhelmingly by Turkish Cypriots in the North, but rejected by the majority of Greek Cypriots in the South. As a result, a divided island nation joined the European Union in 2004. In the North, resentment and isolation persist…
“This is a huge problem,” notes Canan, “and the other countries are responsible. They feed the dispute between us, the Turkish Cypriots and the Greek Cypriots. But now the border is open. We’re talking to each other. We’re developing activities between the two communities. Radyo Mayis, for example, started broadcasting bilingual radio programmes last year”.
Canan, like everyone here, went to the Southern part of the island to get her Republic of Cyprus identity card because legally the republic still encompasses the entire population of the island. “I’m a citizen of the Republic of Cyprus,” she explains, “and therefore a citizen of the European Union”. In her opinion, EU citizenship offers real leverage for opening up the territory and serves as a gateway to the rest of the world.
The effort to break down barriers on the island during the past decade has of course been supported by the Union, which has allocated €259 million to the Turkish Cypriot community since 2006. The presence of the Turkish army has become less obtrusive than it was a few years ago. But, like elsewhere, the impact of the economic crisis is being felt: the salaries of civil servants of the TRNC have been cut by 36% since 2008. The removal of barriers to trade with the South is at a virtual standstill and it is much easier to find Turkish products in the North than to export local production to Turkey.
It is against this backdrop that inhabitants of the Northern part of the island are curious to see the country’s EU Presidency begin on 1 July. With Turkey threatening to “freeze” its relations with the Union during the six months of the Cypriot Council Presidency, the leaders of the island’s Turkish community denounce this ‘European semester’ as another obstacle in the way of the reunification negotiations rekindled in 2008.
“We are not expecting much headway in the negotiations during the EU Presidency,” says Irsen Kücük, prime minister of TRNC. “We proposed to maintain them in the enlarged framework, including Turkey and Greece as guarantor states. But of course this approach was rejected.”
This scepticism is shared by Canan, but worded differently: “I am a European citizen. I’m a journalist and I deal with these issues. But I don’t know what’s going to happen on 1 July. I don’t know what this EU Presidency means in practice. I see no reason to prepare for it”.
For Canan, as for many Turkish Cypriots, the upcoming EU Presidency is perceived today as an event worlds away from their preoccupations. Yet this Presidency, by projecting the island onto the world stage, just may have positive impacts on all its inhabitants. If so, that would not be the least of its successes.
What positive impact for the population?
http://www.europolitics.info/institutions/the-northern-perspective-art335379-37.html
what was vp saying?...
a couple of months ago the turks and tc leadership were full of bravado...as the date gets closer they became pussy cats...
