EARLIER this year, former president Glafcos Clerides published Documents of an Era 1993-2003, a reflection on his decade in power. Written at the very end of his career, this was a book clearly produced with the purpose of securing a place in history for himself and his collaborators.
Indeed, readers should bear in mind that books like this are always written either to make money (which is not the case here), or more often for their authors to cleanse themselves by semi-convincing arguments and distortions in order to appear historically larger than their true dimensions and more sage than their political opponents. As such, political memoirs tend to be intrinsically misleading.
As transpired from this book, Mr. Clerides’ credo and political actions were shaped by his monolithic attachment to the thesis that small countries like Cyprus cannot secure solutions beneficial to their interests to which the great powers are opposed. In a rather confusing fashion, Mr. Clerides argues that Cyprus’ attempts for a solution were flawed due to their lack of realism, but more so because “… the criteria on which …they were based did not enjoy international support, nor were they consonant with the spirit of consensus pursed by the paragons of international power.”
Since Cyprus always had the support of the international community as demonstrated in numerous United Nations resolutions, what is left of Mr. Clerides’ syllogism boils down to arguing that the big powers (i.e. Turkey supported mainly by the US and UK) decided that Cyprus was opposed to their interests and had to pay a price. Is this not really a repetition of ” might is right”, a dangerous anachronism in our time and a resurrection of “gunboat diplomacy?” George W. Bush would certainly welcome the return to this strategy, especially if endorsed obediently by Iraq and Iran. Their capitulation would secure American global hegemony, practically without a shot being fired. But would Britain also not be delighted, and to a smaller extent Turkey, as lesser players in the subjugation of the weak?
Apart from Clerides’ idea not being novel, it does not do justice to the Cyprus cause. This is not the time to expand on this issue except to emphasize that: (1) the validity of the hypothesis has been weakened after the Second World War and the ensued international respect for treaties and the rule of law; (2) Cyprus as an independent country has never challenged the interests of big powers, but as a victim of aggression, was simply crying for respect of its constitution and sovereignty by its guarantor powers and the international community; and (3) Cyprus was not fighting any of the big powers, but expected a big power, Britain, to honour its treaty obligations.
No serious analyst can produce evidence of Cyprus fighting the big powers, unless imagination is left to stretch into the realm of fantasy. And to such a case of imagination and fantasy, we turn to find Clerides’ guilt of contradiction.
This refers to the scandal of the S-300 missiles, which were used as a pre-electoral gimmick to secure another term for Mr. Clerides. The waste of over two hundred millions pounds of public funds was immaterial to Mr. Clerides, as long as his singular ambition for a second term was promoted. That the waste should have been a foregone conclusion for everyone with common sense and a sense of history could be deduced from a comparison of the S-300 initiative with Makarios’ initiative in 1964 to arm the Patriotic Front with machine guns from Czechoslovakia during the inter-communal fighting. Pressures from Turkey and other sources forced Makarios to surrender the imported weaponry to the United Nations. It would have been na?ve to assume that, when for light weapons such an international furore arose, that for the technologically advanced S-300s, Turkey and other interested powers would keep quiet and “respect the unalienable sovereign right of Cyprus to defend itself”.
One of the people who endorsed this “right to defend” was President Clerides. Here is a man who acts contrary to what he preaches, fighting alone against all the world which opposed the missile deployment, purely in order to win the votes of an unenlightened electorate confused by extreme and misguided patriotism.
Maybe Mr. Clerides is a slow learner, who, after the missile debacle, subscribed to the old adage that might is after all right. This proved, however, to be a catastrophe to Cyprus, as demonstrated by the fact that under the fear of Turkish might, his acquired knowledge led him to over-reaction and to excessive concessions in the formulation of the Annan plan. Paradoxically, he denied many of these painful concessions, even though Lord Hannay, Alvaro de Soto, the Greek Prime Minister Mr Simitis, as well as his own adviser, then Attorney-general Mr Markides publicly contradicted him.
Equally unforgiving was Mr. Clerides’ belief in the assumption that Rauf Denktash, once again as many times in the past, would veto concessions either individually or as a whole, owing to his exclusive goal of an independent Turkish state in the north of Cyprus. This belief may also have been shared by Tassos Papadopoulos, who for no convincing reason after his election as President, included Mr. Clerides as a member in the Cypriot delegation that went to Switzerland for negotiations, probably counting on increasing its prestige by raising the average age of its members.
It is really mind-boggling that Mr. Papadopoulos acceded to Mr. Annan’s arbitration when all indications showed that it would not benefit the Greek Cypriot side. Only if Mr. Papadopoulos shared Clerides’ assumption of a Denktash veto could his acceptance of arbitration be marginally justified.
Crucial political decisions, if proved wrong, carry a large cost. Mr. Clerides gave away everything on the basis of a wrong assumption, and ended up begging for a few more months in a third term as president in order to seal his own conceived deal. Probably Mr. Papadopoulos fell victim to the same mistaken assumption. Apparently, both of them refused to give credence to developments in Turkey that contradicted their shared miscalculation. That Prime Minister Erdogan viewed European Union membership as indispensable for freeing his country from the stranglehold of the Ataturk establishment, and that Mr. Denktash as a minor obstacle in this grand scheme was easily dispensable, did not seem to have any impact on the Byzantine thought processes of the two Cypriot presidents. The cost to Mr. Clerides was the loss of the presidency. Whether Mr. Papadopoulos will pay the same price will be shown in the next few months.
n Dr. Panayiotis C. Afxentiou is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Calgary (Canada)
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