by Dr. Nikolaos Stelgias
The Levant Files Chief Editor, Journalist, Historian, Writer, Researcher
The Secretary-General of the United Nations arrives in Cyprus on Monday night, as part of a wider tour of the Levant, to take the temperature of a conflict that has outlived almost every diplomat who has tried to settle it. The stated purpose is modest: to observe the situation on the ground and to sound out the two sides. The unstated purpose is more delicate — to establish whether anything is left of a negotiating process that has not formally existed for nine years.
The Cyprus talks have been on hold since July 2017, when the Crans-Montana summit collapsed over the two issues that have always been the hardest: security — meaning the future of Turkey's military presence and of the 1960 guarantee system — and power-sharing, meaning how much political weight a community of roughly one-fifth of the island's citizens is entitled to hold in a reunified state. Everything since has been process without substance: informal dinners, envoys, confidence-building gestures, and a steady hardening of the facts on the ground.
Any serious reading of the present impasse has to run through Ankara. Not because Turkey is the only obstacle — it is not — but because Turkey is the actor whose calculations are least understood abroad and most caricatured. Understanding Turkish frustration is not the same as endorsing Turkish policy. It is simply the precondition for knowing why nothing moves.
How the Island Broke
For readers outside the region, a short reminder of the sequence is unavoidable, because almost every current argument is a claim about the past. The bicommunal Republic of Cyprus, born in 1960, collapsed in December 1963, when the Greek Cypriot side moved unilaterally to alter the Constitution, arguing that the republic could not function otherwise and that effectiveness had to take priority over the elaborate bicommunal guarantees written into it. The Turkish Cypriots reacted by withdrawing from the institutions of the republic and living, for the next decade, in small enclaves scattered across the island, under the protection of their own armed organization and of officers of the Turkish Armed Forces.
The demographic asymmetry mattered then and still does. When the troubles began, the Turkish Cypriot community numbered roughly 100,000 people; the Greek Cypriot community close to 450,000. A minority of that size, having lost its place in the state, drew the obvious conclusion: political guarantees on paper were worth less than physical protection.
In the summer of 1974 the Greek junta engineered the overthrow of the Greek Cypriot presidency and government of what was by then a defunct bicommunal republic. Days later, the Turkish Armed Forces landed on the island. The negotiations that opened after that summer have never closed and have never succeeded. What they produced instead was the de facto partition of Cyprus and a promise of a federal solution that has still not been delivered more than half a century later.
Ankara's Ledger
Turkey's conduct during the Cyprus troubles is open to challenge from several directions, and it should be. The legal foundation of the 1974 intervention — Ankara's invocation of the 1960 treaties of guarantee, instruments designed to preserve the territorial and constitutional integrity of the Republic of Cyprus — is highly debatable, since what followed was neither restoration nor integrity but permanent division. And the human consequence is not debatable at all. Hundreds of thousands of people, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots alike, were uprooted and made to rebuild their lives on borrowed ground, in houses and villages that were foreign to them, on both sides of the line. Ankara carries a share of the responsibility for that misery, and it has never seriously accounted for it.
The Last Two Decades Tell a Different Story
Yet if the historical record puts Turkey's position in the "problematic" column — a category that, in fairness, accommodates every party to this dispute — the record of the past twenty years does not read the same way.
In 2004, for reasons of its own political and diplomatic calculation, Turkey's new conservative government backed the Annan Plan, and did so against the resistance of nationalist circles at home and of an army that was then still politically formidable. Had the Greek Cypriots voted yes, a United Republic of Cyprus would today be twenty-two years old, would have no significant foreign military presence on its territory, and would sit as a full and undisputed member of the international community. That plan failed on the Greek Cypriot side of the referendum, not the Turkish.
A decade later Ankara opened the door again, and the 2014–2017 round proceeded further than most observers expected before ending, once more, at Crans-Montana. Two Turkish-enabled attempts at reunification in twenty years, both unsuccessful for reasons that were not primarily Turkish, is a pattern that ought to complicate the standard narrative.
Red Lines Against One-Sided Narratives
It is equally undeniable that throughout the 2000s and 2010s Turkey worked to preserve its special relationship with the Turkish Cypriots and to defend its military presence on the island. Those demands were rejected not only by most Greek Cypriots but by a number of international actors as well. In 2017 a European ambassador put it to this writer bluntly: the European Union was not prepared to accept a Turkish trojan horse — by which he meant the Turkish Cypriot side inside the Union.
But Ankara's red lines are not the whole picture and treating them as the whole picture is precisely how the process died. While one side spoke of red lines, the other insisted on majority rights and on the "functionality" of the proposed federation — a striking argument, given that the functional reality currently on offer is a partitioned island — while bypassing the frustrations, demands, and proposals of the Turkish Cypriot community.
The Greek Cypriot side also did rather more than hold a negotiating line. It allowed itself to be drawn into new military and energy alliances. It absorbed a sharper nationalist rhetoric: the ultra-nationalist ELAM is now the third-largest political force in the Republic of Cyprus and among the supporters of the Greek Cypriot leader. It worked to perpetuate the international isolation of the Turkish Cypriots. It answered Turkey's own highly questionable attempt to turn the sealed, barbed-wire city of Famagusta into a horror-tourism attraction with a series of court cases over the unlawful use of Greek Cypriot property in the north. And in international and European forums it did everything possible to present a single-sided account of the conflict — the most recent instance being the attempt to politicize the tragedy suffered by Cypriot women in the summer of 1974.
What the Visit Can Realistically Deliver
Add to all of this the European Union's negative posture towards Turkey across a range of unrelated files, and Ankara's frustration becomes easy to reconstruct. It also makes the likely outcome of the Secretary-General's visit fairly predictable. The best available result is mechanical support — life support — for a process that cannot currently walk: one more attempt to keep the format alive, a few possible measures to raise the level of trust between the sides, and a quantity of diplomatic courtesy. That is not nothing. In the current climate, the additional hope worth naming is simply that the territory, waters, and airspace of Cyprus produce no undesirable incidents in the period ahead.
The Frustration and the Blind Spot
Seen from Ankara, none of this requires a diplomat or a political scientist to decode. Turkey is reacting to one-sided narratives about Cyprus and about the wider region — nothing more, nothing less. That reaction is comprehensible, and the failure of its interlocutors to treat it as comprehensible has cost the island two credible chances at reunification.
The difficulty with Ankara is a different one, and it is Ankara's alone. Turkey is not disposed to discuss its own historical responsibilities — not only towards the Greek Cypriots but towards the whole population of the island. It is not disposed to examine red lines it has declared unilaterally, the most conspicuous of them a permanent military presence on land that is not its own. And it is not disposed to retire a nationalist narrative of its own that mirrors the narratives it complains about. Nor does the record help. The contested turn in Turkey's own domestic politics since the failed coup of 2016 — a sequence of measures whose democratic credentials are, to put it mildly, open to question — has done nothing to strengthen Ankara's hand in Cyprus. A state asking to be trusted as the guarantor of a minority's rights abroad is judged, fairly or not, by how it treats rights at home.
Which is why the key to the dead-end is in Turkish hands, and why the lock is also Turkish. Until Ankara is willing to be examined as closely as it demands its counterparts be understood, the Secretary-General's visits will keep producing communiqués, and the island will keep producing facts on the ground.