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Cyprus' two solitudes

By Gerald Owen

National Post, December 08, 2006

The European Union knowingly put the cart before the horse in 2004 by admitting Cyprus to membership. That decision is now bedevilling the EU's membership negotiations with Turkey. Many people, including the Pope, think that Turkish membership would build a bridge between the West and the lands of Islam. To this, Cyprus is a stubborn obstacle.

What is "Cyprus"? It is a large island where East and West have met for 3,000 years, ever since Greeks settled there after the Trojan War.

The state called Cyprus, on the other hand, has effective control over most, but not all of island. On the remainder, there is a government that calls itself the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC), recognized only by Turkey. The 180-kilometre "green line" that divides these territories is a small iron curtain.

Though the EU denies it has an embargo against northern Cyprus, it is not set up to receive exports from places without recognized governments, though Cyprus is supposedly part of the EU. Some "single market"!

So the TRNC's only access to the world is through Turkey.

For its part, Turkey has closed its ports and airports to goods from the rest of Cyprus -- a most unpromising state of affairs between an actual and a prospective member of what is, at the very least, an economic union.

The European Commission (more or less the EU's cabinet) has proposed to put on hold the negotiations with Turkey, on eight of 35 policy areas. As I write, Turkey has informally proposed to open one seaport and one airport to Cyprus. Greece and Cyprus have said that is not enough.

This mess is one of the many that have been begotten by the winding-up of empires and the attempts to make nation-states out of the remains, with mixed success; India/Pakistan, the Balkans, the Middle East and Ireland all come to mind.

Cyprus is the setting for a great tragedy about jealousy. Shakespeare makes the Venetian Republic send Othello, an African general, to defend the island against the Ottoman Sultan, the head of a Turkish dynasty.

But three decades before Shakespeare wrote Othello, the Sultan had conquered Cyprus from Venice. Turks began to settle there, but Greeks have remained the large majority. At the time, most other Greeks were already the Sultan's subjects anyway.

In the late 19th century, the British wanted to secure the northern entrance to the Suez Canal. In exchange for undertaking to protect the waning Ottoman Empire against a dynamic Russia, the Sultan entrusted the government of Cyprus to Britain, in 1878.

Empires went swiftly out of fashion after the Second World War. In Cyprus, that raised the question of how the Greek majority and the Turkish minority would get on in an independent democracy. Many Greek Cypriots wanted to join Greece. The Turks were not concentrated in any one part of the island; no Turkish "province," equivalent to Quebec, was possible. The Greek advantage in numbers was and is offset by how much closer Turkey is to Cyprus than Greece.

Cyprus became independent in 1960, but nothing was resolved. It became a major trouble spot of the '60s. (Canadians were among the first UN peacekeepers there in 1964, and stayed until 1993.)

Then in 1974, a shaky military dictatorship in Greece tried to reinvigorate itself by sponsoring a coup d'etat in Cyprus by hotheads who promised quick unification with Greece.

Many Greeks fled south, and many Turks fled north. Of a total Cypriot population of 500,000, 180,000 suddenly moved.

The British Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan, is said to have warned the parties that Cyprus would become two big refugee camps -- an exaggeration that expresses what did result. At least this botch-up induced the fascist rulers of Greece to abdicate.

Little has changed since then. The declaration of the TRNC in 1983 made no great difference.

Both parts of Ireland being in the EU has helped calm one island, and EU membership seemed hopeful for Cyprus. As the prospects of its joining rose, Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, proposed a plan for relations between Greek and Turkish Cypriots in a reunited Cyprus. The EU forged ahead, trusting that a referendum would ratify Mr. Annan's plan, but most of the Greek Cypriots rejected it on April 24, 2004. Cyprus was still admitted to the EU, one week later.

Lawrence Durrell -- best known for The Alexandria Quartet -- wrote in his memoir of Cyprus in the 1950s, Bitter Lemons, that "we," the British, should have been "honest enough to admit the Greek nature of the island at the beginning ... Now, it was too late!" That is still true.

Turkey should not be the only party to the dispute making concessions. The EU should also lean on the Greek Cypriots and Greece to do so, and reunite Cyprus.