IN BRITAIN’S view, the United States will hold centre-stage for the rest of the year and beyond in international efforts to break the impasse on the Cyprus problem, because of President Bill Clinton’s planned visit to the region in November.
That spotlight will allow Washington to press Turkey to take more positive stands as regards both Cyprus and Ankara’s overall relations with Greece, British Foreign Office sources said yesterday.
Part of America’s task will be to persuade Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash to drop recognition of his regime as a state as a necessary condition to resumption of intercommunal talks before the European Union summit this year in Helsinki.
A Denktash concession and resumption of those talks would facilitate recognition of Turkey as an EU candidate country, the Foreign Office sources noted.
This window of opportunity was opened by a Greek government initiative for rapprochement with Turkey that occurred long before earthquakes in both countries sparked mutual exchanges of rescue assistance, the sources told the Cyprus News Agency in London.
“It is still a very fragile development, not secure. It could go back tomorrow,” the sources said. “Certainly it is not irreversible, but it is happening after a long time” of sabre-rattling and open hostility between Athens and Ankara.
The Foreign Office sources suggested that core problems like Cyprus and the Aegean could come up for discussion between Greece and Turkey sometime next year.
“One cannot imagine that Turkey’s relations with the European Union could near the stage of starting accession negotiations, without Ankara having in the meantime addressed these problems in the way they were related to in Luxembourg,” the sources said.
It was at the 1997 European Council summit in Luxembourg that Turkey was explicitly rejected as a potential EU candidate country on several grounds, including its poor human rights record, its brutal suppression of its Kurdish minority, and its continued military occupation of northern Cyprus.
At the same time, the EU Council explicitly included Cyprus among the six fast-track EU candidate countries.
In the wake of this snub to Ankara, Denktash hardened his stance towards the Republic, ending all bicommunal contacts and insisting that his breakaway regime gain state recognition before any intercommunal talks could be resumed.
