Keeping process going is not enough

An editorial in Sunday's Mail refers to this week's Limnitis crossing fiasco which UN envoy Alexander Downer called a “bump in the road” of reunification talks, and commends President Christofias for his dogged determination to keep the process going. The paper quotes a European diplomat as saying that in the past such a bump would have “wiped out” the talks but wonders whether the UN envoy was right on insisting that the important thing was to keep the process going. Just keeping the process going is clearly not enough, it says.

Observers point to the genuine work achieved on many of the more technical aspects of the solution – governance, EU matters, the economy - this is the easy stuff. There has been no progress on the dynamite issues of territory, property and guarantees. A diplomat last week tried to put a positive spin on the situation, arguing the big issues were quite simple: “Whereas governance is very technical, territory comes down to a line on a map, guarantees down to a statement of intent. Property is more complicated, but the leaders could put the fundamental principles down and let the aides fill in the gaps,” he said.

The truth is that while the two leaders may always smile for the cameras, they could talk till the cows come home. Hanging on will not deliver us a solution, but does anyone apart from the negotiators really want a solution? The real question is, do Greek and Turkish Cypriots look like people who genuinely want to live together? Does the language and the behaviour emanating from the two sides really suggest they are desperate for a common future? While neither side wants to walk out of the talks and be blamed for their failure, neither side seems to show the slightest enthusiasm for the partner they claim to want to walk along the aisle – indeed bare-knuckled loathing is more the order of the day.

In order to make those compromises on territory, property, guarantees, both sides have got to really want a successful outcome; they’ve got to be aching for it in the way Germans were when they rushed into reunification. Instead of that, we are staring across the barbed wire with a Cold War mentality, picking at each other’s mistakes, waiting for our opponents to make a slip, scoring points, proving that they could never be trusted after all.

The talks can limp along, but if they limp into the New Year, with hardly anything to show for, they will limp into the ‘presidential’ election campaign in the north, an election that, without a spectacular breakthrough in the talks, will almost certainly reward the hardliners. And that will be the end of that.

Makarios Drousiotis says that for a month now, the media, especially TV, has been raking up all the traumatic memories of 1974 including the recent testimony of an unnamed Turkish Cypriot who claimed Turkish soldires disembarked from ships in Kyrenia and massacred 320 Greek Cypriot prisoners with bayonets turning the sea red. Even a rudimentary investigation of the evidence would demonstrate that it was not serious. Logically, the news item should have been thrown in the rubbish binas it had no journalistic value. But if the goal is not to inform but to make propaganda, then the testimony is worth its weight in gold.

He says that anyone with the slightest politcal judgement knows that the ongoing talks represent the last effort to make Cyprus a single geographical area again and the deadline is the end of the year. He claims that there exists in Cyprus powerful factors that are trying to wreckthings at any cost, even that of making the orth of the island Turkish forever. As the end looms closer, this relentless psychologial warfare is intensifying. Ten days before the Agios Mamas pilgrimage was scheduled, the media were prejudging how it would all play out. And that's exactly what happened. Responsibility was placed squarely on the other side. Christofias who was in Paris at the time, cancelled Thursday's talks without receiving sufficient information about events. The next day the government realised it had fallen victim to those wishing to undermine the talks and started damage limitation exercises. But in all this mayhem, the message firmly imprinted on people's minds is that there can be no coexistence and cooperation "with those who massacred us", nor can a complex solution agreement ever hope to be implemented "with those who are from the ouset unreliable and deceitful". Those trying to undermine the talks have every reason to feel happy. On Thursday Volkan, the newspaper of the Grey Wolves had as its banner headline: "Bravo Christofias".