Substantive talks on the reunion of the Turkish and Greek parts of Cyprus will restart in June, after officials from both sides have prepared the ground with a concentrated series of talks. The process will be overseen by the United Nations. All of a sudden, it looks as if a once-intractable intercommunal division is finally approaching an end.
It is very far from a done deal but most of the signs are promising. For a start, the leader of the Turkish Cypriot community, Mehmet Ali Talat, is not cast in the mold of his predecessor Rauf Denktash, who clung to the idea of a separate Turkish state in Cyprus, even when the mainland Turks had come to see it as both a costly and diplomatic millstone around Ankara’s neck. The irony was that, in 2004, when Denktash was finally forced to allow a referendum which voted in favor of reunification, Greek Cypriots, knowing that their part of the island was on track for EU membership, rejected the idea.
The Greek Cypriots, however, last month voted overwhelmingly for the communist presidential candidate, Demetris Christofias, a major plank of whose campaign was the restart of the reunification talks. It also clearly helps that Christofias and Talat are reportedly old friends though this relationship may not count for as much as some hope. Both the then Greek Cypriot President Tassos Papadopolos and Rauf Denktash had been friends before the Turkish invasion in 1974. Yet their relationship did not facilitate a successful outcome to the 2004 reunification talks.
The detailed negotiations that are now beginning will be difficult. Not the least of the issues to be resolved will be the restitution and/ or compensation for property lost by each community in the other’s territory. An added complication is that many Turkish Cypriots left the island in the years after the invasion, either to mainland Turkey or the UK. Successive governments in Ankara sponsored the emigration of Anatolian farmers to work abandoned land in the north of the island. The position of these people could become invidious if a reciprocal restitution of lost property is agreed. Likewise, on both sides of the divide, in the last 34 years, there has often been considerable commercial development on land whose original owners have fled. How will the added value of such investments be handled? In Denktash’s day, such details were sufficient to wreck negotiations. Now, however, the minutiae of a settlement appear secondary to a growing political will that a reunion deal must be done. In such a climate, the cost to individuals may be outweighed by the greater opportunities that will clearly present themselves to a reunited Cyprus.
The plan to remove the frontier barricades across the Ledra Street, once an important Nicosia artery, is both symbolic and practical. Nonetheless, it should not be forgotten that there is no official cross-border trade between the two communities. Perhaps an early next step would be the start of commercial relations, perhaps governed by external arbitration, overseen by the UN.
