A refugee man stands in front of tent at a camp inside the U.N controlled buffer zone that divide the north part of the Turkish occupied area from the south Greek Cypriots at Aglantzia area in the divided capital Nicosia, Cyprus, on Aug, 9.Petros Karadjias/The Associated Press
Robert Rotberg is the founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s program on intrastate conflict, a former senior fellow at CIGI and president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation.
One of the globe’s longest-running conflicts between different peoples is quietly simmering on the strategically situated eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Turkey invaded the former British Crown colony 50 years ago this past July, and about 25,000 Turkish soldiers are still garrisoned in the northern part of the island, with little to do except to (mostly symbolically) protect the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (TRNC), which is recognized as such only by Turkey.
That country controls about one-third of the island’s territory and counts about 383,000 predominantly Turkish-speaking Cypriots as its citizens. The remainder of the island – the Republic of Cyprus – is populated by 1.4 million Greek-speaking Cypriots. It joined the European Union in 2004 without the participation of the Turkish Cypriots.
A United Nations peacekeeping force has occupied and maintained a demilitarized zone between the two republics ever since the Turkish invasion. But since about 2002, relations between North and South Cyprus have largely been peaceful, with only very rare minor outbreaks of hostility.
Cyprus has become a supremely divided island where there is no war and a surprising degree of harmony despite the bitter and irreconcilable political differences between the separated sections of the whole. Since 2002, too, movement across the demilitarized green line has been routine and relatively seamless, requiring just a quick checking of passports. North Cypriots regularly pass, for example, from the northern parts of Nicosia, the still bifurcated capital city, to work in the south. Tourists cross the green line with just as much ease.
Yet, political expectations and determinations are starkly divergent, with both republics having long hewed to future dispensations for themselves that have defied generations of UN negotiators.
South Cyprus claims the entire island as its sovereign right. When the Turks invaded to prevent their fellow Turkish speakers from becoming subjects of a military regime under Greek officers who had ousted the president of what was then a united island, they saved Turkish speakers from being killed and persecuted. Many Turks moved north from exposed positions in the south and west.
But after the Greek-speaking officers who had pursued union with Greece were finally subdued by British intervention, South Cyprus resumed its post-colonial status as the presumed hegemon over the entire island, not just the South. By then Turkey had established a separate entity which, in 1983, declared itself a republic.
Several negotiating teams at the beginning of this century almost managed to persuade North and South to come together, but as a federation with two independent component republics. After several years of assiduous parleying between the two sides, the UN federal plan was put to a vote. Concessions made by the UN to the North resulted in an unexpected majority in favour there, but the concessions upset the South; its citizens voted robustly against the plan.
Cyprus would be a much stronger player in Europe and in the world if both sides of the island operated together as part of a polity that ruled the whole island, but with each component controlling its domestic affairs – education, agriculture, health, tourism – with federal Cyprus, which lies 840 kilometres from Syria and Lebanon and 420 kilometres from Israel, focusing on security, money laundering, banking integrity and corruption, especially since Russian oligarchs and Putin allies use Cyprus to evade sanctions. There are petroleum deposits offshore, too, the exploitation of which could benefit both sides.
Despite a potential petroleum bonanza and hardly any fundamental lifestyle differences between the two sides, there is almost no chance that the frozen Cyprus conflict will be resolved soon – and maybe ever. The North wants the South to accept the fact that it exists and will not go away – and it will demand half of any oil produced offshore. Turkey naturally backs the TRNC; its leaders make frequent visits to North Cyprus to emphasize this.
Whenever negotiators try to unfreeze Cyprus’s disunion, the South reiterates that it will never retreat from its sovereign claims to the entire island. The Turks should not have invaded, they insist, and they see North Cyprus as an illegal usurping secessionist entity.
And so, ingenious attempts to bring the two sides into different forms of federation have never overcome these firm beliefs around the island’s jurisdiction. Likewise, since there is nothing more than harsh words between the two sides now, and no warfare, there is little urgency, especially on the island, to find a workable way to bring Turkish- and Greek-speakers together into a federation. The long-simmering conflict will stay off the boil.