The New Old World (68 page)

Hannay was not wrong in remarking—he was in a position to do so—that, for all the jungle of technical modifications that developed across its five versions, the essence of the ‘Annan' Plan remained unaltered throughout. It contained three fundamental elements. The first prescribed the state that would come into being, if it were accepted. The Republic of Cyprus, as internationally recognized for forty years—repeatedly so by the UN itself—would be abolished, along with its flag, anthem, and name. In its stead, a wholly new entity would created, under another name, composed of two constituent states, one Greek and the other Turkish, each vested with all powers in
its territory, save those—principally concerned with external affairs and common finance—reserved for a federal level. There a Senate would be divided 50:50 between Greeks and Turks, and a Chamber of Deputies elected on a proportionate basis, with a guaranteed 25 per cent for Turks. There would be no president, but an executive Council, composed of four Greeks and two Turks, elected by a ‘special majority' requiring two-fifths of each half of the Senate to approve the list. In case of deadlock, a Supreme Court composed of three Greeks, three Turks and three foreigners would assume executive and legislative functions. The Central Bank would likewise have an equal number of Greek and Turkish directors, with a casting vote by a foreigner.

The second element of the Plan covered territory, property, and residence. The Greek state would comprise just over 70 per cent, the Turkish state just under 30 per cent, of the land surface of Cyprus; the Greek state just under 50 per cent, the Turkish state just over 50 per cent, of its coast-line. Restitution of property seized would be limited to a maximum of a third of its area or value, whichever was lower, the rest to be compensated by long-term bonds issued by the federal government, at tax-payer cost, and would carry no right of return. Of those expelled from their homes, the maximum number allowed to recover residence, over a period of some twenty years, would be held below a fifth of the population of each zone, while just under 100,000 Turkish settlers and incomers would become permanent residents and citizens in the north.

The third element of the Plan covered force and international law. The Treaty of Guarantee, giving three outside powers rights of intervention in Cyprus, would continue to operate—‘open-ended and undiluted', as Hannay records with satisfaction—after the abolition of the state it was supposed to guarantee. The new state would have no armed forces, but Turkey would maintain six thousand troops on the island for another eight years, and after a further interval, the military contingent accorded it at Zurich, permanently. Britain's bases, somewhat reduced in size, would remain intact, as sovereign possessions of the UK. The future Cypriot state would drop all claims in the European Court of Human Rights,
³⁷
and last
but not least, bind itself in advance to vote for Turkish entry into the EU.

The enormity of these arrangements to ‘solve the Cyprus problem, once and for all', as Annan hailed them, speak for themselves. At their core lies a ratification of ethnic cleansing, of a scale and thoroughness that has been the envy of settler politics in Israel, where Avigdor Lieberman—leader of the far right Yisrael Beiteinu—publicly calls for a ‘Cypriot solution' on the West Bank, a demand regarded as so extreme that it is disavowed by all his coalition partners. Not only does the Plan absolve Turkey from any reparations for decades of occupation and plunder, imposing their cost instead on those who suffered them. It is further in breach of the Geneva Conventions, which forbid an occupying power to introduce settlers into conquered territory. Far from compelling their withdrawal, the Plan entrenches their presence: ‘no one will be forced to leave', in Pfirter's words.
³⁸
So little did legal norms matter in the conception of the Plan, that care was taken to remove its provisions from the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights and European Court of Justice in advance.

No less contemptuous of the principles of any existent democracy, the Plan accorded a minority of some 18 to 25 per cent of the population, for all practical purposes, 50 per cent of decision-making power in the state. To see how grotesque such a proposal was, it is enough to ask how Turkey would react if it were told that its Kurdish minority—also around 18 per cent—must be granted half of all seats in its Grand National Assembly, sweeping rights to block action in its executive, not to speak of exclusve jurisdiction over some 30 per cent of its land area. What UN or EU emissary, or apologist for the Hannay plan among the multitude in the Western media, would dare travel to Ankara
with such a scheme in his brief-case? Ethnic minorities need protection—Turkish Kurds, by any measure, considerably more than Turkish Cyriots—but to make of this a flagrant political disproportion is to invite hostility, rather to restrain it.

Nor were the official ratios of ethnic power to be all. Planted across the tundra of the Plan's many other inequities, foreigners were imposed at strategic points—Supreme Court, Central Bank, Property Board—in what was supposed to be an independent country. Topping everything off, armed force was to be reserved to external powers: Turkish military remaining on site, British bases trampolines for Iraq. No other member of the European Union bears any resemblance to what would have been this cracked, shrunken husk of an independent state. Greek Cypriots overwhelmingly rejected it, not because they were misinformed by Papadopoulos, or obeyed directives from Christofias—opinion polls showed their massive opposition to the Plan before either spoke against it. They did so because they had so little to gain—a sliver of territory, and crumbs of a doubtful restitution of property—and so much to lose from it: a reasonably well-integrated, wellregarded state, without deep divisions or deadlocks, in which they could take an understandable pride. Why give this up for a constitutional mare's nest, whose function was essentially to rehouse the ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus', condemned as illegal by the UN itself, as an equal partner in a structure jerry-built to accommodate it? Cut to foreign specifications, the Constitution of Zurich had proved unworkable enough, leading only to communal strife and breakdown. The Constitution of Bürgenstock, far more complicated and still more inequitable, was a recipe for yet greater rancour and paralysis.

There was, however, a logic to this. The rationale for the entire scheme, like that of its predecessor in 1960, lay outside Cyprus itself, the interests of whose communities were never more than ancillary in its calculus. The fundamental drive behind the Plan, in all its versions, was the fear that if Cyprus, as constituted, were admitted to the EU without being taken apart and retrofitted beforehand, it could veto the entry of Turkey into the Union until it relinquished its grip—soldiers and settlers—on the island. The bottom line of Hannay's calculations was thus always what would be acceptable to Ankara, helping it to seek membership of the EU without provoking public opinion or the ‘deep state' in Turkey. The AKP government, viewed not inaccurately as the ideal partner for the West, could point to domestic resistance,
threatening the grand common goal of its entrance into Europe, every time it wanted to secure a concession in the Cypriot sideshow, and its interlocutors would fall over themselves to oblige it.

As in 1960 and in 1974, it is pointless to blame Turkey for the process that led to 2004, in this case less of a success for it anyway. On each occasion, it acted according to classical precepts of
raison d'état
, without undue sanctimony, after being invited to do so. The authors of the latest attempt on Cyprus lie elsewhere. Behind the bland official prose, Hannay's memoir has the involuntary merit of making it plain that Britain was at the end of the story, as it had been at the beginning, the prime mover in efforts to fix a cape of lead over the island. In that sense, Hannay was a lineal successor to Harding, Caradon and Callaghan, in the record of callous disregard for the fate of Cyprus as a society. Britain, of course, did not act alone. Historically, in all three crises when the future of the island was at stake, the US abetted the UK, without ever quite playing the leading role, until the last moment.

In the final episode, however, a new actor stepped on stage, the European Union. If the British set the ball rolling towards another Zurich in 1996, and the Americans followed in 1997, it was not until the end of 2002, with the arrival of the AKP in power, that the EU establishment in general rallied to the Anglo-American determination that Turkey must—for economic, ideological and strategic reasons alike—be admitted in short order to the Union. Though scattered misgivings persisted, by 2003 Brussels, in the persons of Romano Prodi as president of the Commission and Günter Verheugen, commissioner for enlargement, was fully behind London and Washington. Hannay, whose knowledge of the workings of the Commission was unrivalled, had taken care to square Verheugen well before this, securing his assurance that the EU's
acquis communautaire
—the body of rules with which candidate countries must comply, including freedoms of residence and investment certain to be a sticking-point north of the Attila Line—would not stand in the way of a settlement that annulled them in Cyprus.

Verheugen made no difficulty. On all subsequent occasions—in Ankara with Erdog˘an on the eve of his flight to Annan and Bush in early 2004; at the end-game in Bürgenstock two months later—he was at pains to explain that the normal
acquis
would not apply. This despite the fact that, as Hannay notes appreciatively, ‘he was precluded from clearing his lines
in advance with member states': i.e., he ignored his mandate without consulting them.
³⁹
Ponderous and self-important, a kind of German Widmerpool—now a figure of fun in his own country, since he was snapped cavorting in the nude with his secretary on a Lithuanian shore—Verheugen attempted to intervene directly in the Cypriot referendum with a lengthy interview on behalf of the Plan. Incensed when no television station would touch it, he was little short of apoplectic when the Plan was rejected. Such was, indeed, the general reaction in Brussels to the refusal by Greek voters to fall in with its will: an incredulous fury also expressed by virtually the entire European public sphere,
FT
and
Economist
in the lead, that has scarcely died down since.
⁴⁰
Were another lesson needed in what the Union's dedication to international law and human rights is worth, its conduct over Cyprus supplies the most graphic to date.

Nor, of course, is it over. Having escaped from the trap set in Switzerland, Cyprus entered the EU politically intact a week after the referendum, on 1 May 2004. In the intervening years, the scene on the island has altered significantly for the better. Physical partition has diminished since the opening of check-points by Denktash in 2003, allowing travel across the Green Line between north and south. The immediate effect was a huge wave of visits—over two million in a couple of years—by Greeks to the north, often to look at their former homes, and an inflow of Turkish workers to the south, where they now make up a tenth of the labour force in the building industry. The more lasting result has been the granting of a large number of official Cypriot documents to Turks with legitimate rights on the island—by the spring of 2005, some 63,000 birth-certificates, 57,000 identity-cards and 32,000 passports—reflecting the magnet of EU membership, and economic growth well above the Union average.
⁴¹
In 2008, Cyprus became only the second member-state since enlargement, after Slovenia, to enter the Eurozone.

Politically, the landscape shifted when AKEL withdrew from the government in 2007, after deciding that for the first time in the history of the Republic it would run its own candidate for the presidency. AKEL had always been far the strongest party in Cyprus, indeed for a long time the only real one, yet could never aspire to lead the state, given Pan-Hellenism and the Cold War. But the solidity of its anchorage in the trade-union and co-operative movements, and the prudence of its direction after the collapse of the Soviet bloc—it drew its conclusions from the
débandade
of Italian Communism—have given it a striking capacity to ride out adverse currents of the time. In exchange for backing Papadopoulos in 2003, it acquired key ministries for the first time, and by 2008 was ready to try for the presidency itself. In the first round of the vote in February, Christofias was the runner-up, knocking out Papadopoulos; in the second, with the support of Papadopoulos and his party, he knocked out Clerides's candidate, becoming the first Communist head of state in the EU.

A burly, avuncular figure, Christofias, who comes from a village near Kyrenia in the north, joined AKEL's youth league in his teens. In his twenties he studied in Moscow, where he got a doctorate in 1974, returning to Cyprus after the Turkish invasion. By 1988, at the relatively young age of forty-two, he had become leader of the party. Speaking with tranquil fluency, he stresses AKEL's long-standing criticism of both Greek and Turkish chauvinism, and commitment to good relations between the two communities, without attempting either to minimize or to equate the suffering of each—of which his family has personal experience: going north after 2003, ‘my sisters were literally sick when they saw what had happened to our village'. The UN Plan, he argues, contained too many obvious concessions to Ankara to be acceptable, so for all his ‘many, many meetings with Hannay and my good friend Tom Weston', when time was refused to reconsider it, he could not recommend the package to his party, and there can be no return to it now. But AKEL maintained links with the Turkish Republican Party (CTP), now the governing party in the north, throughout the years when Denktash forbade any contact between the two communities, holding several secret meetings with it abroad. Since the referendum the two parties, with their trade-union and youth organizations, have had regular sessions together, fostering AKEL's aim of ‘a popular movement for rapprochement'.