Cypriot Unification Slides Toward Stagnation

Supporters of the beleaguered Cyprus reunification process might have been encouraged when, earlier this week, a government spokesperson from the Greek Cypriot south indicated that his government might be willing to restart negotiations with the Turkish Cypriot north. The remarks were a rare moment of hope in the grim few weeks that have passed since the Crans-Montana Conference. Hailed as the best chance for progress in more than a decade, it ended without resolution.

Even this aftershock in the form of a conciliatory statement from the south, which might have inspired measured optimism, has already been smothered by Turkey. The Washington Post reports:

“It is clear that there is no point to continue negotiations from where they stopped, [Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim] said during celebrations in Cyprus’ breakaway Turkish Cypriot north for Turkey’s 1974 invasion that followed a coup aiming at union with Greece.

Yildirim said Greek Cypriots were to blame for the collapse of the talks because they weren’t ready for a deal.

Earlier, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Ankara would consider other alternatives to the current U.N. format of reunifying Cyprus as a federation made up of Greek and Turkish speaking zones.”

These developments suggest the situation is backsliding in Cyprus. For proof of this, one need only compare the failure at Crans-Montana to the last Cypriot flirtation with reunification. The Annan Plan of 2004 made it as far as its referendum stage, when both Greek and Turkish Cyprus voted on the plan. The Turkish north strongly favored it; the Greek south resoundingly rejected it. But at Crans-Montana, no plan was even produced since the negotiations broke down at the drafting phase.

The Annan Plan and the Crans-Montana Conference ultimately faltered on the same issue: security. The Annan Plan would have allowed Turkish troops to remain on the island in perpetuity, but with an agreed-upon phased-reduction (by 2017, only 3,000 would have remained instead of 35,000). This measure was a compromise by the Turkish side, but it still made the plan unacceptable to Greek Cypriots. They could not abide even a small foreign army quartered on their land indefinitely. In Crans-Montana, the Turks refused any compromise on troop presence.

This evolution in Cyprus negotiations tracks with the ups and downs in Turkey’s relations with the EU. In 2004, prospects for Turkish accession were renewed. Its military presence in Cyprus, another applicant for EU membership, needed to be addressed. Two years into his first term as Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan insisted that the perpetual troop guarantee be added late in the 2004 negotiations. U.S. and EU negotiators rushed it through despite the obvious danger to the success of the process.

It is a sign of the steady decline of the EU’s competence and credibility that the Crans-Montana talks failed as badly as they did. All sides in the negotiations have grown less compromising. The Turks are unwilling to offer a realistic compromise on security, and the EU unwilling and unable to fight for one. Furthermore, as President Erdogan heads down the path of domestic authoritarianism and tacks ever closer to Putin’s Russia, Cyprus may be one of many hotspots around at the periphery of Europe that will suffer as relations between the EU and Turkey continue to cool.

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