IT COULDN’T have been much clearer: a direct rebuke from the British government to the London Transport Authority for its decision to ban advertisements for holidays in northern Cyprus – a decision fully in line with the Cyprus government’s position that such advertising is ‘illegal’.
The British government took the opportunity to stress that it remained “committed to ending the isolation of the Turkish Cypriots”. This is no longer much of a surprise, but it is worth underlining to show how far things have moved on in the past year. Before the referendum, it was taken as a matter of course that the international community would support the legal positions of the Republic of Cyprus against the unrecognised claims of a pseudo-state established by force of military occupation.
Now, the positions would appear to have been reversed; the arguments of the Republic of Cyprus are casually dismissed, and the government appears to be waging a rear-guard battle to maintain whatever positions it still can. Our diplomatic standing has been eroded, and a lot of the barriers we had successfully erected over the decades to fence in the illegal regime in the north are coming down.
There is no doubt that this is a consequence of the failed referendum of last April, and for those who feel strongly enough about the dangers that were inherent in the Annan plan, it may well be a price worth paying.
That is entirely legitimate, but the government needs to come clean about it. What is hard to accept is the argument that nothing has changed; that, no, Cyprus is not suffering any adverse consequences from last April’s decision. Who are they kidding? Are they happy to see Mehmet Ali Talat having greater access to the corridors of power than President Tasso Papadopoulos? Are they OK with the fact that tourists can now travel straight from Larnaca airport to Kyrenia for a fortnight, at a time when our own tourism industry is in desperate need of a shot? Do they approve the EU’s Green Line regulations that allow Turkish Cypriots to sell ‘our Morphou oranges’ on the market in the south?
The decision to say ‘no’ last April was an entirely legitimate, democratic decision. What is hard to understand is the failure to accept and recognise the consequences, the abject failure to engage in fence-mending and damage limitation among our erstwhile friends in the international community, the ostrich-like mentality that sees us maintain that all is well in the best of all possible worlds when it clearly isn’t. The sooner our government is honest about our predicament, the greater chance it has of mitigating its effects.
