The New Old World (67 page)

Not all of this is indigenous. Having taken two-fifths of the island, inhabited—after invasion and regroupment—by less than a fifth of the population, Turkey had a huge stock of empty houses and farms on its hands, from which their owners had been expelled. To fill them, it shipped in settlers from the mainland. What proportion of the population these now represent is a matter of dispute, in part because they have since been supplemented by temporary workers, often seasonal, and students from the mainland. Official Turkish figures suggest that no more than 25 to 30 per cent out of a total of some 260,000 persons come from the mainland; Greek estimates put the number—there were just under 120,000 Turks on the island in 1974—at over 50 per cent, given that there has also been substantial emigration. Only scrutiny of birth certificates can resolve the issue. What is not in doubt, however, is that the Turkish army maintains 35,000 soldiers in the zone it has occupied since 1974, a much higher ratio of troops to territory than Israel has ever deployed to protect its settlers in the West Bank.

If the military division of the island has remained static for thirty years, its diplomatic setting has been transformed. In 1990 Cyprus applied for membership in the European Community. Although its application was accepted three years later in principle, in practice no action was taken on it. In Brussels, the prize was enlargement to Eastern Europe, on which all energies were focussed. Cyprus was viewed as at best a distraction, at worst a troubling liability. Turkey, which had applied to join in 1987, and whose suit had been stalled, was bound to be angered at the prospect of Cyprus achieving membership before itself. For Council and Commission
alike, Cyprus was the least welcome of candidates for admission to the Union. Good relations with Ankara were of much greater moment.

There matters stood until Greece, at last helping rather than harming its compatriots, in late 1994 blocked the customs union which Brussels was offering Turkey, to keep it sweet while its application to join the EU remained on hold. By this time, the second Papandreou was nominally back in office, but in advanced stages of personal and political decay. In the all too brief interval between his quietus and a dreary reversion to dynastic government in Athens—where today indistinguishably conformist offspring of the two ruling families alternate once again—there was momentarily room for some exercise of independence in European councils. The foreign minister of the time, Theodore Pangalos, greatly disliked in Brussels for his refusals to truckle, made it clear that the Greek veto would not be lifted until Cyprus was given a date for the start of negotiations for its accession. In March 1995, a reluctant France, presiding over an EU summit at Cannes, brokered the necessary deal: Cyprus was assured an accession process by 1998, and Turkey was granted its customs union.
³¹

Amid the fanfare over expansion into Eastern Europe, these events were not conspicuous. But their potential for inconvenience did not escape notice in one capital. No sooner had Britain's ambassador to the UN retired at the end of the year, than he was asked by the Foreign Office to become the United Kingdom's special representative on Cyprus. Sir David—now Lord—Hannay, who began his career in Iran and Afghanistan, was Britain's foremost European diplomat, with some thirty years of involvement in EU affairs behind him. His summons came from Jeremy Greenstock, soon to become famous for his services to Blair as ambassador to the UN and special representative in Iraq. The appointment made clear the importance of the mission. ‘The enlargement of the European Union', writes Hannay in his memoir
Cyprus: The Search for a Solution
, explaining his brief, ‘was a major objective of British foreign policy and must in no way be delayed or damaged by developments over Cyprus', not least since Britain was ‘the European country most favourable to Turkey's European aspirations'.
³²

Still more favourable was the United States. From the early nineties onwards, the EU was looking over its shoulder at Washington, which made it clear that, once Eastern Europe was in the bag, the strategic priority was Turkey. As the deadline for negotiations on Cypriot accession came closer, the Clinton administration sprang into action, with pressure on European governments to admit Turkey that even Hannay found ‘heavyhanded'. But manners aside, Britain and the US were at one on the need to ensure that there be no entry of Cyprus into the EU without a settlement of the island palatable to Turkey beforehand, to forestall any complications in Ankara's own bid for membership. The simplest solution would have been to block Cypriot membership until Turkey received satisfaction, but this was ruled out by a Greek threat to veto enlargement to the East as a whole if Cyprus was not included. That left only one course open: to fix Cyprus itself. In the summer of 1999, the UK and US got a resolution through the G-8 that pointedly ignored the legal government of the Republic of Cyprus, calling on the UN to superintend talks between Greeks and Turks in the island with a view to a settlement.

This was then rubber-stamped by the Security Council, formally putting Kofi Annan in charge of the process. Naturally—he owed his appointment to Washington—Annan was, as Hannay puts it, ‘aware of the need for the UN to cooperate as closely as possible with the US and the UK in the forthcoming negotiations'.
³³
In practice, of course, this meant his normal role as a dummy for Anglo-American ventriloquists. Recording the moment, Hannay never bothers to explain by what right the UK and US arrogated to themselves the position of arbiters of the fate of Cyprus; it went without saying. A UN special representative, in the shape of a dim Peruvian functionary, was chosen to front the operation, but it was Hannay and Tom Weston, special coordinator of the State Department on Cyprus, who called the shots. So closely did the trio work together that Hannay would boast that a cigarette paper could not have been slipped between their positions. In command was, inevitably, Hannay himself, by a long way the most senior, self-confident and experienced of the three. Successive ‘Annan Plans' for Cyprus which materialized over the next four years were essentially his work, details supplied by an obscure scrivener from the crannies of Swiss diplomacy, Didier Pfirter.

The first of these Plans was produced punctually a few days before the EU summit in Copenhagen in December 2002, at which the Council was due to consider the upshot of negotiations with Cyprus. The pious fiction of the secretary-general was maintained, but he had little reason to stir from New York. For its author—after Annan had ‘set out the prize to be achieved . . . in terms almost identical to my CNN Turk interview'
³⁴
—was on the spot, conferring with Blair as the various heads of state gathered in the Danish capital. The Anglo-American campaign to secure Turkish membership had acquired new urgency with the victory of the AKP at the polls in November, bringing to power the first government in Ankara for some time with which Washington and London felt completely at home, and whose leaders Tayyip Erdo
ğ
an and Abdullah Gül arrived in Copenhagen to press their suit. The UN Plan—‘Annan I'—was adjusted at the last minute to give them further satisfaction, and—as ‘Annan II'—presented to Clerides, now president of Cyprus. It was vital, in the eyes of its architects, to get the Plan agreed by both Greek and Turkish Cypriots before the Council took any decision on Cypriot entry into the EU. Clerides indicated, with a nod and a wink, that he was ready to sign. But to Hannay's consternation, Denktash—controlling the Turkish Cypriot delegation from afar—refused to have anything to do with it. Amid the ensuing disarray, the EU leaders had to make the best of a bad job. Cyprus was accepted into the Union, effective from the spring of 2004, and Turkey—provided it met EU norms for human rights—was promised negotiations on its candidature, effective from the winter of 2004.

The AKP proclaimed this pledge a historic achievement for Turkey, with some reason. Its success in securing a date for starting negotiations towards accession, in good part due to heavy pressure from the Bush administration, strengthened its hand at home. But it was still new to power, and in failing to bring Denktash to heel in time, had been unable to forestall the prospect of Cypriot membership in the EU without arrangements on the island agreeable to it signed and sealed in advance. Worse still, once Cyprus was inside the EU, it would have a power of veto over Turkey's own entry.

Yet Turkey was, after all, suing for acceptance of its candidacy at Copenhagen, after a long period in which it had been rebuffed. Questions of political experience aside, Erdo
ğ
an was not in that
strong a position there. The more pertinent question is why the European powers, having rallied to the American case for Turkish entry, permitted such a risky inversion of the schedule for Cyprus—giving membership a green light before a settlement was reached that was supposed to be a condition of it. The answer is that the EU leaders believed, correctly, that once a Turkish government applied itself, it would have little difficulty in getting Turkish Cypriots to accept what it had decided upon. Once that was achieved, they assumed that the concurrence of the Greeks—already available at Copenhagen—could be counted on. There were still fifteen months to go before Cyprus entered, and time enough to tie down the settlement that had been missed on that occasion.

This calculation, however, assumed that they would still have the same interlocutor. Western establishments had become used to the comfortable presence of Clerides, who had been president of Cyprus for a decade, a fixture of the Right with no thought of upsetting any geo-political apple-cart of the Atlantic Alliance. Unfortunately, within two months of his gracious performance at Copenhagen, elections were due in Cyprus. In February 2003, standing for yet another term at the age of eighty-three, he was trounced by Tassos Papadopoulos, Makarios's youngest minister at independence and closest colleague in his final years, who enjoyed the support of AKEL and the Cypriot Left. His presidency was unlikely to be so pliable.

Undeterred, Hannay and his collaborators piled on the pressure. After a meeting between Annan, Weston, De Soto, and himself in New York, at which ‘not surprisingly, since we had all been working closely together for over three years, there was effectively a consensus over our analysis of the situation and our prescriptions for action',
³⁵
Annan in person was dispatched to Nicosia, with a third version of the Plan to be put to a referendum in the two parts of the island, and a summons for Papadopoulos and Denktash to agree to it a week later in the Hague. But this was now March 2003. The AKP government was not only embroiled in arguments over the impending war in Iraq—on 1 March the Turkish parliament defied Erdo
ğ
an and Gül by rejecting US demands for passage of American troops for the invasion—but in the throes of getting Erdo
ğ
an, hitherto technically debarred from becoming a deputy,
into Parliament and making him premier. Amid these distractions, Ankara failed a second time to curb Denktash, who blocked the Plan once again. In frustration, Hannay threw up his hands and quit. The UN shut down its office in Cyprus.

But once the AKP regime had consolidated its hold in Ankara, and come to an understanding with the army—in October it secured a vote for Turkish troops to help out the American occupation in Iraq—it was in a position to enforce its will in northern Cyprus, where Denktash's autocratic rule had by now anyway made many restless. Signals of Ankara's displeasure were enough to swing local elections against him in December 2003, letting the main opposition party into government. The AKP had made Turkish entry into the EU its top priority, and having sorted this out, wasted no time. In January, a common position on Cyprus was hammered out with the Turkish military on the National Security Council, and the next day Erdo
ğ
an travelled to Davos to brief Annan, then flew on to meet Bush in Washington. The effect of their conversation was immediate. Annan was summoned to the White House, and twenty-four hours later had issued an invitation to the two sides in Cyprus plus the Guarantor Powers to join him for talks in New York.

There, he explained that to cut through previous difficulties, if there were once again no agreement, the UN Plan should be put directly to the voters of each community, regardless of the views of the authorities on either side. This time, the secretarygeneral's script had been written in America, and US diplomats brought full pressure to bear on Papadopoulos and Denktash, to force them to accept the prospect of such a diktat. The following month, talks entered their final phase at another Swiss resort, Bürgenstock in Interlaken, where the Greek delegation was headed by the younger Karamanlis—nephew of the statesman of Zurich—who had just become premier in Athens. Once again, American emissaries hovered discreetly in the background, this time as members of the British delegation (the US was not a Guarantor Power), while the foreground was dominated by the Turkish premier. A fourth edition of the UN Plan was adjusted to meet Turkish demands, and a final, non-negotiable version—‘Annan V'—was announced on the last day of March. A jubilant Erdo
ğ
an told his people that it was the greatest victory of Turkish diplomacy since the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, sealing Kemal's military triumph over Greece.

Time was now short. The fateful day when Cyprus was due
to become a member of the EU was just a month away. The referendum extorted in New York was called for 24 April, a week beforehand, and copies of Annan V—a tombstone of more than nine thousand pages—were hastily prepared, final touches coming only in the last forty-eight hours before the vote. The approval of Turkish Cypriots was a foregone conclusion: they were not going to turn down a second Lausanne. But on 7 April, in a sombre address on television, Papadopoulos advised Greek Cypriots against the Plan.
³⁶
Since Clerides's party had declared for it, the critical judgement appeared to be AKEL's. The combined weight of Washington, London and Brussels was brought to bear on the party, and the Greek electorate at large, to accept the Plan. From the State Department, Powell himself telephoned the leader of AKEL, Dimitris Christofias, to secure a favourable opinion. In New York, two days before the referendum, the US and UK moved a resolution in the Security Council endorsing the Plan, to impress on voters that they should not trifle with the will of the international community. To much astonishment (indeed outrage—Hannay found it ‘disgraceful'), Russia used its veto for the first time since the end of the Cold War. Twenty-four hours later, AKEL came out against the Plan. When votes were counted, the results said everything: 65 per cent of Turkish Cypriots accepted it, 73 per cent of Greek Cypriots rejected it. What political scientist, without needing to know anything about the Plan, could for an instant doubt whom it favoured?