United Nations chief Antonio Guterres travelled to Cyprus this week with an offer of new peace talks – the latest attempt to resolve a conflict that has outlasted 11 of his predecessors. The island's division, sealed by Turkey's 1974 invasion but rooted in the flawed power-sharing constitution of 1960, is one of the world's longest-lasting frozen conflicts.
Guterres on Wednesday said he "plans to convene fresh talks on Cyprus to resolve the decades-long division on the Mediterranean island, stressing that the moment calls for rebuilding trust between its two communities", according to the UN.
On his first official visit to the country he met with the Greek Cypriot leader Nikos Christodoulides and Tufan Erhürman, the Turkish president of Northern Cyprus, as well as stakeholders, saying he had held “frank and constructive discussions”.
However, he gave no date for the proposed talks, saying they were contingent on "adequate preparation".
Christodoulides, president of the Greek Cypriot-majority and internationally recognised Republic of Cyprus, welcomed the announcement.
He declared himself optimistic and said it was "the first time" since talks collapsed in 2017 that "the substance of the Cyprus issue was discussed".
'A power-sharing constitution'
Fiona Mullen, director of Sapienta Economics, a Nicosia-based think tank, said the talks could be a "phased process where both sides get irreversible gains".
"You get the two communities building up trust, and then you have a referendum."
Guterres, who leaves office at the end of this year, was on the first visit to the Mediterranean island by a UN secretary-general since 2010 – one intended to show "solidarity with the people of Cyprus" and his commitment to "finding, or helping to find a solution".
He said this solution would involve all Cypriots and Cyprus's "guarantor powers" – the United Kingdom, Greece and Turkey, all of whom co-signed the 1960 treaty that guaranteed the country's independence, embedded in its new constitution.
"It was a power-sharing constitution," said Mullen, with a Greek Cypriot president, a Turkish Cypriot vice-president and government positions reserved for both communities.
However, she added: “Greek Cypriots didn't like this, they didn't want independence. They wanted ‘Enosis' – to unite with Greece."
This movement was spearheaded by Archbishop Makarios, head of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus and the island's dominant political figure.
Makarios had championed union with Greece during the 1950s campaign against British colonial rule, before becoming the young republic's first president in 1960 – and gradually shifting towards independence as a goal.
Within three years the deal fell apart.
In late 1963, Makarios proposed constitutional changes that would have curtailed Turkish Cypriot rights. Inter-communal fighting erupted within weeks, and the Turkish Cypriots left government.
In March 1964, the UN Security Council responded by creating a peacekeeping force, UNFICYP, which took up positions between the two communities – and remains on the island to this day.
The peacekeepers contained the violence but never entirely stopped it: sporadic clashes continued, and in 1967 fighting around two mixed villages brought Cyprus, Greece and Turkey to the brink of war. The crisis was defused only when Athens withdrew thousands of troops it had covertly stationed on the island.
'They never left'
Then, in 1974, the military junta ruling Greece instigated a coup to overthrow Makarios, by then both president and religious leader of the Greek Cypriots.
The colonels in Athens, hardline champions of Enosis, had come to see Makarios as an obstacle: he had abandoned union with Greece and had just demanded the withdrawal of Greek officers from Cyprus. The coup replaced him with a pro-Enosis hardliner.
Turkey invoked its right of intervention under the 1960 treaty and sent in troops.
"They called it a 'peace operation', the Greek Cypriots called it an 'invasion'," said Mullen. Had Turkey restored constitutional order and withdrawn the troops, "you could have said it was their right under the constitution, but they never left".
Politically divided since 1963, the island was now physically divided too. Turkish Cypriots moved north and all but a few Greek Cypriots moved south.
The dividing line – known as the Green Line, after a British commander drew it across a map of Nicosia in green pencil during the 1963 fighting – was extended along the 1974 ceasefire line to cut across the entire island. It became a UN-patrolled buffer zone roughly 180 kilometres long, and in places only a few metres wide, sealed off with fences, watchtowers and minefields.
In 1983, the Turkish Cypriot administration unilaterally declared the existence of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The UN Security Council's resolution 541 called the declaration "legally invalid" and Turkey remains the only country to recognise it.
In 2004, on the eve of Cyprus's accession to the European Union, the UN proposed the "Annan plan", which posited a federation of two states in a "United Republic of Cyprus".
Some 65 percent of Turkish Cypriots backed this plan in a referendum, but nearly 76 percent of Greek Cypriots rejected it. A week later, Cyprus joined the EU still divided.
The last major peace effort – UN-brokered talks between Greek Cypriot president Nicos Anastasiades and Turkish Cypriot leader Mustafa Akinc, held in Crans-Montana in Switzerland in 2017 – brought the two sides closer than ever on power-sharing and territory.
But the conference, attended by the three guarantor powers and by Guterres, foundered on security.
The Greek Cypriots demanded an end to Turkey's right of intervention and the withdrawal of its 30,000-plus troops in the north. Ankara insisted on keeping both. The talks broke up without agreement – and Cyprus problem was not formally discussed again until this week.
A flawed process
Today, there is cautious optimism. Erhürman, elected last autumn on a pro-unification platform, told Guterres: "We strongly support and welcome your efforts."
However, Erhürman "is not a pushover", according to Mullen, who said he will refuse to return to the table only to "end up in the same place that we were before".
Turkey's position too remains a hurdle. Its President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned on Wednesday that any initiative ignoring the "sovereign equality" of Turkish Cypriots was "doomed to failure" – although Mullen notes that formula "is not incompatible with a federal solution".
The methodology that has been used to date is completely flawed. It doesn't involve citizens, it's very top down.
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REMARKS by Fiona Mullen
Jan van der MadeThe more pertinent issue, she argues, is the process itself.
"The methodology that has been used to date is completely flawed. It was invented in the 1950s. It doesn't involve citizens. It's very top-down. And surprise, surprise, it keeps failing."
Apathy in the south of the island is another problem, she said.
With some 60 percent of its residents born after 1974, reunification is "a much more difficult sell for the Greek Cypriots... what can you offer them that makes it attractive enough to reunite the island?"
