THERE is again talk about talks. This week, Mehmet Ali Talat sent a letter to Tassos Papadopoulos indicating he would be prepared to meet. The letter was in response to an earlier request from Papadopoulos for the leaders of the two communities to hold talks within the context of last year’s moribund July 8 agreement, and we can hope that some sort of contact can be resumed within the coming weeks.
Beyond that, it’s hard to be optimistic for any development. Of course, the international community has welcomed the possibility of the two sides talking to each other again – how could they do otherwise? – but few will have the slightest expectation of any substantive outcome.
We have after all been here before. The two leaders had been due to meet last month, but the meeting was called off amid recriminations over… the visit to the north of Luton Town football team for pre-season training. When a kick-about between a lowly English side and an ‘unrecognised’ team from the north is enough to derail talks about the Cyprus problem, does anyone seriously believe that we have reached the stage where any progress is possible?
Nor can anyone who listens to politicians of both sides be convinced that this meeting is offering anything more than lip service to the idea of talks. Neither side loses an opportunity to snipe at the other. Even while announcing Talat was willing to meet Papadopoulos, his spokesman Hasan Ercakica launched a vicious attack on Foreign Minister Erato Kokakou-Marcoullis, saying that if she continued in the same vein her anti-Turkish statements could derail the talks. Needless to say, the language of Greek Cypriot politicians hardly oozes with good will for Turkey and the Turkish Cypriots.
The fact is that both sides are more entrenched in their positions than ever. There is not the slightest good will on either side, and politicians are locked into a cycle of nationalistic one-upmanship, feeding off each other’s bitterness. Papadopoulos wants a meeting purely to disprove opposition accusations that the Cyprus problem is not in the deep freeze on the eve of an election, while the Turkish Cypriots may go along with it, reluctantly, if only to avoid being seen as the party sabotaging talks.
In any case, no one can expect anything beyond a formality with Cyprus entering a presidential election campaign. In Turkey, meanwhile, where Papadopoulos keeps telling us the key to the problem lies, Tayyip Erdogan is unlikely to waste any political credit on Cyprus as he is embarking on a tug of war with the military in his bid to seal the presidency for his ally Abdullah Gul. In any case, with Turkey’s EU course on the backburner, the one incentive for Turkey to give way on Cyprus is fading by the day.
