By Selim Kuneralp
Based on his experience as the British government’s Cyprus coordinator, Lord David Hannay once said: “No one has ever lost money betting against a Cyprus settlement.”
During my long diplomatic career which included a posting in Northern Cyprus itself, the Cyprus problem has rarely been far away from my preoccupations. Lord Hannay’s words have always stuck in my mind whenever an attempt is made at solving this intricate problem. However, in the last few weeks, I really started to think that we were approaching just that. After a long break, the secretary-general of the UN was testing the waters to see whether they were promising. Ankara encouraged him. So did the other main concerned parties. His personal representative shuttled between the capitals and nowhere was she told that she was wasting her time.
As a retired ambassador who has spent much of his career on EU-Turkey relations, I thought that finally the Turkish government had come to accept that objectives such as modernisation of the Customs Union and active participation in the defense industries of EU countries required progress on the resolution of the Cyprus problem and Turkey’s positive efforts in that direction. The EU is a transparent institution and its requirements from Turkey as far as Cyprus is concerned have been repeated again and again for decades. When a date was fixed for the secretary-general’s visit and the expectation floated that he might use that visit to announce the convening of a high-level conference of the five parties principally concerned (the three guarantor powers and the two communities on the island), I naively concluded that the Turkish government had abandoned its long-standing precondition of recognition of the sovereign equality of the two entities on the island. After all, this precondition had prevented talks earlier as the UN is constrained by the parameters agreed as far back as 1977 and 1979 which did not provide for such recognition.
WIDENING GAP
I also consider – although many of my compatriots might disagree – that the status quo on the island favors the Greek Cypriots to the detriment of their Turkish neighbors. After all, they enjoy all the advantages of membership of the EU, and indeed of the international community in general whereas Turkish Cypriots are stuck in roughly one-third of the island and are almost completely isolated from the outside world. Their passports are not recognized if they are issued by the Turkish Cypriot authorities and they can only travel abroad via Turkey if they are not lucky enough to possess a Republic of Cyprus passport. Because they lack recognition, there is very little investment on their part of the island, except for Turkish companies and that mainly in construction and the hospitality business.
As a result, the income gap between North and South widens year on year. Not surprisingly, support for a solution based on a federal solution is growing, particularly among the young who have no recollection of the troubles that their grandparents lived through 50-60 years ago. For them what matters is a better livelihood.
That is why almost two-thirds of the electorate voted for President Tufan Erhürman, who promised a more positive approach to eventual negotiations than his rival and predecessor. More importantly, he abandoned talk of sovereign equality for the two parts of the islands, including in the press conference that he gave after the secretary-general’s visit.
The visit did not produce a date for a 5+1 meeting. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced that more preparation on methodology and substance was needed before such talks could be expected to produce a concrete result. President Erhürman in his press conference did not seem overly concerned and claimed that thanks to institutional memory at the UN, Mr. Guterres’ successor would have no difficulty picking up where he left off.
NO CHANGE FOR ANKARA
I beg to differ. If no progress can be achieved rapidly, the new secretary-general, expected to be a Latin American who will come in with a completely new team, will have many other priorities than Cyprus to focus on. After the Annan Plan debacle of 2004, the incoming secretary-general, Mr. Ban Ki-Moon, kept Cyprus at arm’s length during his 10-year mandate.
Listening to President Erhürman, I was not encouraged by what I heard. The issues on the table had not changed over the decades. No progress seemed to have been made on any.
More worryingly, Ankara seems to stick to its insistence on prior recognition of Northern Cyprus’ sovereignty as a precondition for talks. This is how I read the statement issued by the Foreign Ministry after the collapse of Mr. Guterres’ mission. So it seems that the status quo will remain in force, Turkey will continue to face the Cyprus obstacle in its relations with the EU, and the Turkish Cypriots will continue to suffer isolation.
Lord Hannay has been proved right again, much to my disappointment.
*Born in 1951, Selim Kuneralp is a retired Turkish ambassador whose career spanned key posts including ambassador to Sweden and South Korea, and permanent representative to the EU and the WTO. He also served as deputy undersecretary, before retiring from the Foreign Ministry in 2014.
