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Hands off Northern Cyprus
John Laughland finds Rauf Denktash determined to fight integration with Europe — and Greece — A trip to Northern Cyprus is a trip to the 1970s. While the Greek South of the island — home to the Russian Mafia and to the ecstasy-induced raves of Ayia Napa —seethes in corrupt prosperity, the Turkish North indulges in the gentler delights of crazy paving, the New Seekers and Ford Capris.

If Kofi Annan and the European Union get their way, however, all this will be swept away. As is attested by the minarets stuck on the cathedrals, and by the curry and mashed potato which intrude into the mezze, Cyprus’s history is one of persistent and ugly foreign interference. So is its present: the UN and the EU have delivered an ultimatum to Cyprus, demanding that the 29-year-old partition of the island be resolved by next Friday. It matters little to the international planners that huge chunks of the so-called ‘plan’ are, in fact, blank pages, in which the most intractable issues have been simply left unresolved, or that the ‘peace plan’ will require 50,000 Turks to leave their homes, with 60,000 more to follow over the next 20 years. It matters little, indeed, that the mere announcement of the plan’s existence has wreaked havoc in the North’s housing market, as banks have started to call in their mortgages on disputed territory. This dog’s dinner of a plan was served up to the veteran Turkish Cypriot leader, Rauf Denktash, while he was lying in a US hospital following heart surgery at Christmas. Evidently Mr Annan hoped to bounce the old fox into signing in a few weeks what he had spent the last quarter-century trying to resolve; or perhaps, as one diplomatic wag commented, the secretary-general was secretly hoping that the old boy would quietly die from the shock.

For it is clear that the international community wants to get rid of the man who has headed the unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus since 1974. Fat with a 750,000-euro grant from the European Union — which is itself only part of the 20 million euros the EU has spent on pro-EU propaganda in Cyprus — the Chamber of Commerce of Northern Cyprus was put up to organise a spontaneous demonstration for ‘peace’ and ‘Europe’ in Nicosia late last December. The republic’s teachers helpfully went on strike that day, so that their pre-voting-age pupils could be bused in to swell the numbers on the march; people were also flown in from Britain and America. The organisers were careful to distribute banners in English, so that the world’s media would duly spin the image of massive popular feeling for Europe and against Mr Denktash. The mainland Turks have also been co-opted: the so-called Islamist leader of the governing party in Ankara, Recep Tayyip Erdogan — a man who is the toast of the town in all the chancelleries of the West — announced brusquely at the beginning of January that Ankara did not intend to continue its Cyprus policy of the last 40 years. In other words, Mr Erdogan is preparing to drop the Turkish Cypriots in the soup, if betrayal is the price demanded for allowing Turkey to shin an inch further up the greasy pole of EU membership. For the campaign against President Denktash is following precisely the strategy outlined by the former EU ambassador in Turkey, Karen Fogg, in a series of emails which, rather embarrassingly for her, were leaked to the Turkish press this time last year.

One of the key players in the pro-EU movement in Northern Cyprus is that beacon of business respectability, Asil Nadir. After he jumped bail in 1993, following the collapse of Polly Peck, his fraudulent business empire in London, Nadir fled to his native North Cyprus, where he duly started up new business operations. Among his many holdings are the republic’s main media outlets. The biggest daily, Kibris, used to have an anti-EU and pro-Denktash editorial line. ‘But in December the owner ordered a change in our editorial policy,’ the editor of the paper, Basaran Düzgün, candidly told me. ‘Ninety-four per cent of Turkish Cypriots support EU membership,’ Mr Düzgün went on, evidently proud that the EU’s polling figures in North Cyprus can compete honourably with those of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. ‘But Mr Denktash is negative about the EU. He once said that Brussels is like a grinder which will make us all into mince-meat. He is like those British nationalists who are anti-EU.’

The septuagenarian Denktash combines the quick movements that often accompany an ample girth with the sharp mind of the Lincoln’s Inn barrister he once was. ‘The only message of the Annan plan is that the future is bleak,’ he told me incisively. ‘They say we must sign now or miss the European train. But we know perfectly well where this train is heading: into the arms of Greece.’ The Turkish Cypriots are convinced that EU membership is just enosis by another name, the union with Greece which they fought the 1974 war to prevent. Mr Denktash also refuses to sign up to the displacement of tens of thousands of his citizens before anyone has explained who is going to pay for it. ‘We have seen that the money promised to Afghanistan and Serbia never arrived,’ says Mr Denktash; he is evidently one of those stubborn fools who refuses to believe that EU membership comes complete with the Brooklyn Bridge.

Denktash used to have a good working relationship with his octogenarian opposite number in the South, Glafkos Clerides. But the Annan plan has not only caused havoc in the North’s banking system; it has also destabilised the politics of the South. In Sunday’s elections, Clerides was turfed out for being too emollient about property restitution, and replaced by the hard-line Tassos Papadopoulos, a man who became a minister under Archbishop Makarios in the early 1960s following his distinguished service in Eoka, the underground paramilitary organisation which fought the British and later massacred Turks as part of the secret Akritas Plan ethnically to cleanse the island. ‘When I was captured by the Greeks in 1966,’ Rauf Denktash told me, ‘Mr Papadopoulos ordered that I be shot. It was only because Makarios countermanded this order that I survived.’ He sounds like the perfect interlocutor for the EU; but is it too much to hope that, one day, the international community might adopt an alternative strategy, towards Cyprus as towards the rest of the world, and just bloody well leave everyone alone?