Serious differences on property

“There are serious differences and disagreements on the (property) issue”, President Christofias said yesterday after another session of talks with Turkish Cypriot leader Mr Dervis Eroglu in an effort to solve the Cyprus problem.

“We also had an open discussion on various other issues, which I believe is needed with Mr Eroglu. On the interpersonal level, the situation is not so bad”, he added.

The Special Respresentave of the UN Secretary-General in Cyprus, Lisa Buttenheim said the two leaders continued their discussions on the property issue “in a constructive atmosphere” and their representatives will meet today to continue the same discussions and advance them.

Asked if there has been any progress at all, Mrs Buttenheim said: "The fact that these meetings are taking place between the leaders and at the Representatives’ level so many times in August is a very positive sign".

Invited to comment on media reports that the UN may be considering pulling out its good offices mission by the end of the year, if a solution is not found, she said: "I haven’t seen these reports, but the important thing is to concentrate on the fact that the talks are taking place now and we are fully behind them".

The Turkish Cypriot leader said after the meeting yesterday that the two sides had submitted their views and positions on property.
Eroglu added that they will table more detailed positions during a meeting in the first week of September.

The leaders will meet again on 10 August.

The National Council convened on Tuesday with internal unity the main subject on its agenda, according to Government Spokesman, Stefanos Stefanou, who said it was in order “to strengthen the President of the Republic at the negotiations”.

Reports in the Greek Cypriot press said that the conclusion reached was that efforts to solve the Cyprus problem are not going well. What’s more unity wasn’t achieved either in that there was a contretemps between DISY leader Anastasiades and President Christofias and in that everyone except DIKO were against Christofias’ proposals.

These proposal tried to link discussion of property with that of territory and immigration. The Turkish Cypriots have rejected this, arguing that it ends up being a means of sabotaging the talks. Resolving the property issue is already complicated, so why insert other chapters into it, the Turkish Cypriots said preferring to deal with issues one by one and then trading off non-agreed subjects at the end of the process.

An article in the Guardian yesterday refers to recent attacks against foreigners on the island and says that the major source of such disregard for people outside one's own ethnic group is the Cyprus problem, and no solution currently on the table would address this.

Defining each other only as 'Turkish' or 'Greek' has left Cyprus with a victim complex, struggling to cope with rising immigration, the paper says.

Whether one chooses to date the situation to the invasion by Turkey in 1974, the coup by junta-supported Greek Cypriots the same year, the bombings by Turkey in 1964, the attempt by Greek Cypriots to tear up the constitution in 1963, or simply to the British colonial strategy of divide and rule, the fact is that Cypriots have been split along ethnic lines far beyond living memory. The sandbags and barbed wire of the Green Line that runs through the middle of Nicosia are only the most potent reminder of this.

Since 1974, the international conversation about Cyprus has been of "bi-communal solutions". Both sides have formally committed to separate administrations for Greek and Turkish Cypriots plus a central assembly where representatives of the two sides will meet in equal numbers. Another possible solution, talked of with increasing frequency, is of a permanent partition into two states. External parties – the UN, EU, UK, Greece and Turkey – allow no other possibilities to be discussed.

Allowing only two ethnicities into the national conversation encourages zero-sum thinking, where "we" can only win if "they" lose. Both sides try hard to portray themselves as the only victims of the conflict, often in toe-curlingly exaggerated language.

Like all victim complexes, the Cypriot version leaves little room for nuanced understanding of a newly multicultural country. Faced in the 1950s with the need to formally assign minorities to one of the two permitted groups, Cypriot authorities decided the question along religious lines, with the mostly Muslim Roma becoming "Turkish" and the Catholic Maronites "Greek". How might they deal with today's growing Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish populations? Why should their descendants be forced to become "Greek" or "Turkish"?

Without external pressure to admit that the biggest injustices on the island these days are practiced against non-indigenous populations, Cypriots will continue to assume a pose of self-righteous victimhood, the paper concludes.