THAT the Cyprus problem could be solved at closed-door discussions between the Republican Turkish Party (CTP) and AKEL was the message AKEL party spokesman Andros Kyprianou and CTP general secretary Ferdi Sabit Soyer sought to convey at a seminar on Monday night at Nicosia’s Intercollege.
Entitled ‘Prospects for a Solution in 2005’, the seminar was billed as a chance to meet Soyer, the man set to become ‘prime minister’ of the north after the April 17 ‘presidential’ election expected to anoint current ‘prime minister’ Mehmet Ali Talat.
Attended by seasoned Cyprus commentators, representatives of non-governmental organisations, politicians and a smattering of journalists, the occasion could have been a fine opportunity to sound out two prominent politicians on what Cypriots should expect from the coming year. It turned out, however, to be a clarification of what most Cypriots have long since feared: that the politicians were sadly lacking in ideas for bridging the divide, and that the concerns of the two communities were so polarised that even with the best intentions, they are almost impossible to bridge.
Knowing this to be true, Kyprianou and Soyer, rather than deal directly with the issues that divide the communities, sought to persuade their audience that all would be well if their parties were allowed by the public and the media to negotiate in private.
“We need less public speaking and more bilateral talks,” Kyprianou told the audience. He combined this observation with an accusation that the media was in the habit of distorting the statements of politicians in such a way that harmed the search for a solution.
Yet more contentious was Kyprianou’s belief that the same approach should be applied to negotiations in general, backing President Tassos Papadopoulos’ view that the Greek Cypriot side’s reservations on the Annan plan should not be disclosed before negotiations actually start.
“Believe me, we know very well which amendments we want in the plan,” Kyprianou insisted, while refusing to say what they were.
Yet what many Greek Cypriots may find hard to swallow is that Kyprianou seems prepared to keep the public in the dark on what changes AKEL want to see made to the plan, while apparently being ready to discuss them openly with the CTP, a bizarre logic since it is the CTP that the Cyprus government will find itself negotiating against if and when talks resume.
Kyprianou also failed to do more than pay lip service to the idea of bizonality as the basis for a Cyprus agreement. While the audience heard him give his support to a revised version of the Annan plan that envisages the two communities living predominantly in separate zones with the two zones sharing equal political clout, it was left wondering whether his party would have the courage to sell a plan that did not see all Greek Cypriot refugees returning to their homes.
And how confident is AKEL that it can change Papadopoulos’ mind that the plan is not fundamentally flawed? As Soyer pointed out later in the evening, if Papadopoulos wants to negotiate the plan “from A to Z”, then it is not the Annan plan that is being negotiated.
Answers to the question of how such problems would be dealt with were far from forthcoming.
Those who had come to the seminar to acquaint themselves with Soyer found his introductory speech one-dimensional. While he did make a number of important points, his speech sounded too much like a CTP manifesto, with a greeting and salutation at either end.
His most salient issues were that a peace deal, preferably in the form of something very close to the Annan plan, should be negotiated in the near future, and that in order for a new version of the plan to emerge, the CTP was willing to sit down and negotiate. His aim, he said, was to turn the Greek Cypriot ‘no’ into a resounding ‘yes’. Of course, he would attempt to do this without turning the Turkish Cypriot ‘yes’ into an overwhelming ‘no’.
Soyer sought to explain the huge gap between Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot traditional perceptions of the island’s recent history. “For Greek Cypriots the Cyprus problem began in 1974; for Turkish Cypriots, that’s where it ended.”
He described how, from that perspective, there evolved the idea in the north and in Turkey that “no solution [was] the solution”. This approach, he said, died the death in Helsinki in 2002 when Denktash went against the wishes of the Turkish government and refused to allow the signing of a preliminary agreement that could have taken the north into the EU with the south.
Here, Soyer gave credit to the current Turkish government under Tayyip Erdogan and Abdullah Gul and compared the lack of change among Greek Cypriots between now and 2004 poorly with that seen in the Turkish world. He bemoaned the one-sided entry to the EU of the south, warning that the dynamics of the EU could have both positive and negative effects, most worryingly that it could cement rather than bridge the divide.
Soyer and Kyprianou talked only of problems, and while both politicians claimed they were optimistic over prospects for a solution, they offered none. Their only offering was an expression of faith that negotiations between the two parties could achieve results.
Most frustrating was that both politicians repeatedly refused to deal publicly with the issues at stake. Soyer, for example, refused to deal with a question from the audience on whether a reconciliation committee, as envisaged in the Annan plan, would be useful. Kyprianou managed to do the same, and later when asked what constituted the Cyprus problem other than the Turkish occupation, he failed to come up with a single point.
Soyer did, however, manage to put in some good words about what his government had been doing since it took power at the beginning of 2004. Challenged to respond to concerns that the north was being flooded by unregulated immigration from Turkey, he said that from April 1 mainland Turks would need their passports to enter Cyprus through the north.
“We no longer give citizenship easily,” he added, pointing out that no one was more concerned about the problem than the Turkish Cypriots themselves, who fear their culture is in danger of being overshadowed by mainland Turkishness.
On fears of an uncontrolled construction boom on Greek Cypriot lands in the north, Soyer tried to reassure his audience by telling them of restrictions recently imposed on building in the Karpas region. He conceded, however, that building development would continue in the north until a solution was found because it was a major source of income; just because the Greek Cypriots had rejected the Annan plan, no one should expect the Turkish Cypriots to “sit back and wait”.
Overall, the feeling in the audience was one of a missed opportunity for Soyer to speak to the Greek Cypriots. He also looked more than a little out of depth. The impression was of course borne from the fact that he was in deep linguistic water: he badly needed a translator. Either he had not been able to find one, or had decided (wrongly) that he did not need one. For the record, Tayyip Erdogan never speaks in English, always using an interpreter, and he loses very little credibility by doing so.
