History has a way of sweeping past ancient, seemingly intractable disputes, leaving them like rocks marooned by an inexorable tide. The-28-year division of Cyprus is just such a dispute.
Wednesday two old men who have known each other for almost 60 years, sat down on in a building on an abandoned airport in Nicosia, in the no- man’s land that separates the Turkish and Greek Cypriot peoples. The leaders of these two communities, Rauf Denktash, aged 79 and 83-year- old Glafcos Clerides, had promised to continue talking until they reached a settlement.
If however they repeat past failures to find a solution to Cyprus’ division, both sides of the island will be worse off, but the Turkish Cypriots and the mainland Turks, who have supported them economically and politically for so long, will be the greater losers. Now therefore is the time to end a stand-off which has lost all justification. Their negotiations were due to revolve around a detailed UN plan, which would among other things, create a federated Cyprus with a weak central government headed by a revolving presidency, and two separate Parliaments. One sticking point has been the proposed reduction of the territory controlled by the Turkish administration from 36 percent to 28.5 percent of the island.
However if Denktash continues his opposition, he will be missing the core issue. The UN proposals are not and should not be an end in themselves, but a route along which, maybe in ten or twenty years, Turks and Greeks will feel sufficiently confident to abandon any division and come together again as a single, united, multiethnic community. If a deal is not struck by the end of next month and ratified by referenda planned for March, the Greek Cypriot part of the island will continue alone and quickly on its way to membership of the European Union. Not only will the Turkish Cypriot community be left isolated but Turkey itself, which has paid so dearly to support it, will find itself in an impossible position in its own attempt to gain admittance to the EU. Denktash therefore carries on his shoulders, far more than the future of his own community. And the time frame is made the more urgent because next month, Greek Cypriots are due to vote on their presidency. Clerides, who had planned to retire, has decided to stand again, to see his community through the EU joining process, with which he has been intimately connected.
His opponent, Tassos Papadopoulos, welcomes EU membership but is deeply opposed to a reconciliation with the Turkish community. If Clerides goes to his electorate without a done deal on Cypriot reunification, and he loses the vote, the Turkish Cypriots will find themselves once again isolated and the prospects of any deal put away, probably for years.
Though Denktash’s own hard line has its supporters, there is now a majority of Turkish Cypriots which favors an end to division. The 50,000 who demonstrated this week in favor of agreement, represented fully a quarter of Denktash’s community.
His reaction to the demonstration was the angry comment that it undermined his bargaining position at the talks. He is wrong. The popular outburst actually demonstrated that the Turkish Cypriot community is in large measure committed to making reunion work. This should strengthen, not weaken his hand, because it shows that Greek Cypriots have little to fear from the two communities coming together again. When Turkish airborne troops landed in Cyprus in 1974, they stopped plans to join Cyprus to the Greek mainland and protected the Turkish community. Now Greek Cyprus stands on the brink of melding peacefully with the European Union and by extension, Greece itself. The Turkish Cypriots and in their turn, the mainland Turks, could be part of that stabilizing and economically beneficial process. Or they could be left to their own devices. It all relies on the wisdom of two old men at an abandoned airport.
