How Europe can help make the Cyprus agreement work

Let me tell you the story of an island that offers hope for Cyprus.

Situated on the edge of Europe this island has suffered one of the longest-running local conflicts in the West.

The conflict has its roots in hundreds of years of a rule by a former imperial power which even today controls the northern part of the island against the wishes of the majority of the population. That control was retained for strategic reasons that have long since been superceded by developments in military technology.

Historically policies of divide and rule left the population in the north dangerously split between the descendents of generations of settlers brought in by the controlling power and the historic inhabitants of the island. There were grievances over the land, jobs, housing and equality. Over the years there have been murderous attacks and massacres by each community on the other, most recently in the 1960s and 1970s, requiring the presence of tens of thousands of troops to maintain the status quo.

That island, is of course Ireland and while there are some significant differences, there are many obvious parallels between the problem in Northern Ireland and the Cyprus problem. Not the least of them is that Ireland and Britain joined the European Union, or rather its predecessor the European Economic Community in 1973, shortly before a plan for power-sharing, known as the Sunningdale Agreement, was attempted in the province.

That effort failed because it did not contain some of the key ingredients needed to make a plural political system work. But the context of European membership has since changed the nature of the relationships between the key political players. It has allowed a viable new form of government to emerge for Northern Ireland – though it is in abeyance at the moment. And the fighting has ended in any true sense save for the elimination of arms dumps and the complete withdrawal of British forces.

What’s this got to do with Cyprus? There is a very strong case for arguing that the peace process in Ireland would not have progressed without Britain and Ireland’s membership of the EU. In Cyprus too the EU is providing the catalyst for agreement - a form of federal settlement - through the carrot of possible Turkish accession. It is also providing the context in which an agreement can work.

Unlike the agreement proposed in Northern Ireland in 1974, the Annan Plan does contain the ingredients necessary to make a plural system work. And compared with its early stages in 1974 the EU today is a road-tested, proven, problem-solving machine that we know can help diffuse these kinds of conflicts, as it did in Ireland.

So what does the European context offer?

First, EU membership for Cyprus and Turkey’s candidacy, provided it continues to progress, will add a new dimension to relations between Greece and Turkey, between Turkey and Cyprus, and between Cyprus and Greece. After a Cyprus solution it will also change relations between Turkish Cypriots and Greeks and Greek Cypriots and Turks.

The first way it does this is by opening up new channels of communication between Cypriot, Turkish and Greek leaders. This will enable them to see out periods of friction, more easily come to understand each other’s point of view and provide more opportunities for reaching a consensus. As a good analysis by Cork academic Clodagh Harris shows, it made a significant difference in Ireland.

Let me offer an anecdote. Garret Fitgerald was the Irish prime minister who signed the landmark Anglo-Irish agreement with Margaret Thatcher in 1986. The agreement gave the Irish Republic a say in the affairs of Northern Ireland for the first time. It was designed to allow the Catholic minority to have a means to raise their grievances and paved the way for other landmarks on the road to the peace process of today. It was an act of genuine statesmanship on the part of Margaret Thatcher, quite out of character with other stances she took, and should be applauded. The Iron Lady, in fighting a war against Argentina over the Falkland Islands, made famous her conviction that sovereignty was non negotiable. I once asked prime minister Fitgerald what on earth persuaded to concede on precisely that issue in Ireland. His answer was very revealing. He said that in private discussions he persuaded Thatcher that alienation was not a concept created by the Marxist philosopher Gramsci, who is often associated with it, but first appeared in Middlemarch, the novel by another renowned English lady, the writer George Elliot.

Clearly this was not a conversation they had had over the negotiating table. It showed that a level of intimacy had been built up only a few years after IRA hunger strikes had brought sympathy for the IRA to an all-time high in the face of Mrs Thatcher’s hardline response.

That closeness of contact and the negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement itself were made possible by the attendance of both leaders at EU summits and the increased frequency of contact necessary under the Irish presidency of the European Council prior to the agreement. The same can be said of Albert Reynolds and John Major and Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern who between them produced the Downing Street Declaration of 1993 and the Belfast Agreement of 1998. As John Major recounted in his memoirs: “Ministers met regularly on mutual ground and on non-Irish matters and this familiarity eased disputes and bilateral tensions.”

In Greek-Turkish terms the Cem-Papandreou dialogue, now continuing with the new Turkish government, has created similar possibilities for understanding over both Cyprus and Turkey’s EU membership and the Cyprus problem.

Just as Ireland needed to understand that the British presence was not the only obstacle to a solution, however unjustified, so too do Greek-Cypriot people - as well as politicians - need to be aware that Turkey’s presence is not the only obstacle to peace in Cyprus. The painful compromises asked in the Annan Plan – though some may need to be worked on further to be practical – are necessary to adjust legitimate historic grievances held by Turkish Cypriots over their fears of becoming a permanent minority, not free to run their own affairs, at risk from extremists. The alienation born of the failure of plural government in the 1960s and the use of force needs to be recognised and addressed.

However, the EU has also shown that it is not necessary for the Turkish Cypriots to have a separate sovereign state in the traditional sense to achieve this. Full sovereignty is something all countries concede on in order to join the EU, where sovereignty is pooled on key issues.

This brings us to the second positive factor introduced via EU membership: it offers a live demonstration of how the kind of plural political system envisaged in the Annan Plan can succeed. A plural or power-sharing system is necessary to make democracy work among populations fragmented by ethnic and religious differences. The system avoids the possibility of permanent minorities or the antagonisms of a majority system by offering government by a grand coalition and other important factors such as autonomy, a mutual veto and proportionality.

The system ensures that each ethnic group can safeguard

its interests on sensitive matters via the veto and can run its own affairs under liberal democratic principles of self-determination because of autonomy. But decisions concerning issues of common interest are made with the agreement of all political or ethnic segments according to the principle of proportionality.

It might seem strange to Cypriots to be asked to embrace the peculiarities of the Annan Plan, such as the six-man rotating federal presidential council and the wide degree of autonomy offered in each constituent state. But the Greek Cypriots have already embraced this way of working by joining the EU, the largest working model of a plural system, and Turkish Cypriots have demonstrated en masse on the streets their desire to embrace it too.

Operating within the EU would give Cypriots a parallel experience of conducting business within the kind of plural system the Annan Plan sets out. Between the Commission, the Council and the European parliament, it is a world of multinational negotiations, coalitions, vetos, qualified majority voting, proportionality and weighting of votes. The apparatus of Europe helps countries maintain a dialogue and the kind of alliance building it requires helps build conciliatory attitudes.

The EU was born out of a desperate desire among European countries to end the cycle of wars that had ravaged Europe so disastrously in World War 1 and 2.

The fact that Greek Cypriots have opted to join such a pluralist system sends an important message to Turkish Cypriots that Greek Cypriots are committed to this approach. This is a long step away from the days of the enosis campaign and the early 1960s when Greek Cypriot leaders appeared to at best ignore or at worst override the aspirations of Turkish Cypriots. This change in attitude should be acknowledged by the Turkish Cypriot leadership instead of the laughable claim we heard during the Turkish Cypriot elections that 1 May 2004 would mark a return of enosis.

The third EU factor is something which may achieve what the 1960 agreement failed to do – allowing Cyprus and Cypriot culture to improve its standing in the world.

The Irish experience shows that there is far more esteem to be gained from taking a place at the table in the organisation that controls the largest single market in the world – something like 450 million people – than via the spoils of petty nationalism. Turkish Cypriots keen to ensure their politics and culture will flourish rather than be subsumed in Europe should learn Ireland’s lesson.

Ireland’s full sovereignty was ratified in 1937 but it remained in Britain’s shadow and unnaturally dependent on the British economy for decades afterwards. Politically its parties remained divided according to their position on Ireland’s battle for sovereignty over the whole island, and the Irish Troubles soaked up much of the political energy.

Ceding some sovereignty to the EU by contrast has proved liberating. Participation in the Common Market, Single Market and Exchange Rate Mechanism plus cash from the European Social Fund have helped make Ireland the confident Celtic tiger it has become today. For the first time that people can remember it is no longer an emigration nation. Its culture is flourishing across Europe and beyond. Overall (with the exception of its thirst for winning the Eurovision song contest) the country’s international status has not been greater for a thousand years.

This is exactly the kind of improved status Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots could one day enjoy together in a reunited Cyprus playing its part in a European presidency as Dublin is today.

A fourth factor is the assistance and encouragement the EU gives conflict societies to ease grass roots cross-community contact, reconciliation and intercultural education.

We know from the 1960s that no settlement in Cyprus will last unless it means more than a mathematical calculation, more than a bargain arrived at by politicians. It must create a dynamic for rapprochement not just through the processes of government but through daily life. The EU has contributed considerably through its Peace and Reconciliation fund in Ireland and can do the same in Cyprus, especially by helping the north catch up once the island is reunited.

In Cyprus there is already a strong tradition of grass-roots bicommunal groups working to bring former village neighbours and young people from either side together. People like Nicos Anastasiou, Sevgul Uludag and Ulus Urkad and many, many others have worked tirelessly for years to bring understanding through contact. The contribution of everyone participating in bicommunal events, women’s groups and youth movements should be acknowledged for the important part it is playing in making peace possible.

Some of these peace campaigners on the Turkish Cypriot side have had to endure endless acts of political intimidation, which would be totally unacceptable in any politically developed European country. These acts have ranged from black propaganda, phone taps, being spied on by the police to open threats of violence against them published in newspapers that have gone unpublished by the authorities in the north. Well let me tell you now, you can say goodbye to those practices and the politicians who encourage them in the new Cyprus and the EU. No democratic leader worth his salt would allow that kind of behaviour to continue. And European governments have shown how they deal with the far right by closing ranks against Joerg Haider in Austria and freezing relations with his country.

This does not mean that people with extreme views have no legitimate role to play. One reason why the peace is holding in Northern Ireland is that representatives of the men of violence were brought in from the cold and allowed to participate in the debate and in the electoral process, as long as they left the violence and intimidation behind. Unlike in northern Cyprus, where opposition leaders have been treated as a national security threat for voicing an alternative opinion, in Northern Ireland politicians with diametrically opposed opinions – let’s face it Gerry Adams believes in the dismemberment of the Northern Irish state – have been able to sit down and work together as they should in any democratic country.

And the fifth context: education. When two countries are co-operating so closely, respecting each other as partners, as they do in the EU, it no longer makes any sense to have school curricula, textbooks and methods of teaching that fuel tension and hatred. From an educational point of view it makes no sense anyway, but history teaching, in particular, is so often treated as a tool of social cohesion by newly independent or defensively nationalist countries rather than a means of developing real understanding of history and improving thinking skills.

There have been some remarkable developments in education in Northern Ireland, which are well worth a study visit by Cypriot politicians and teacher trainers. In history both in the province and across the UK a new style of history curriculum and teaching methods was introduced. Instead of concentrating on learning a list of key events determined by politicians, the focus is on an inquiry-based approach in which the pupils act as mini historians, learning to examine a variety of sources of evidence and weigh up their bias before coming to a conclusion. Instead of being brain-washed with inflammatory material, students can actively seek it out and examine what its author’s intent was, what were the causes of the emotions behind it, and how that should affect their judgement of its quality as a source.

At the same time, new compulsory strands to the curriculum were introduced. One called education for mutual understanding involved learning how to resolve conflict in our daily lives peacefully. Another called cultural heritage involved learning about the different and common cultural heritage of all the various people of Ireland, Britain and Europe. There were voluntary cross-community schemes too in which children from Protestant and Catholic schools spent a day a week working together on joint curriculum projects in one of their two schools.

You know what this means when you have visited the Short Strand, a Catholic enclave in Belfast surrounded by Prostestant houses, as I did ten years ago. There is a so called “peace wall” that cuts one road in two. Every Thursday a door opened in the wall because it backed onto a school playground and out trooped young children from the Protestant school to visit a Catholic school across the road under the protection of their Catholic peers. The Catholic school was where the first IRA shots were fired when the Troubles erupted in 1968 – and when I visited the women teachers on both sides said they had been told they would be shot if they continued this work. But they didn’t flinch. Before this programme many children on the Protestant side of the wall had never met a Catholic and the Catholic children had never met a Protestant, even though they lived in the next street.

Northern Ireland is reaping the benefit of these schemes now – though it is recognised that too little has been done to similarly educate the adult community, the families which these children return to after school. It is accepted in Northern Ireland that a key failing that is allowing an undercurrent of tension to continue is the absence of a process of truth and reconciliation, acknowledgement of the wounds or wrong-doings of the past, as took place in South Africa after Apartheid. That will be desperately needed in Cyprus, where hearts are still raw over many things.

I didn’t want to get bogged down in this talk about the guessing game on whether Turkey will join the EU. I have tried instead to demonstrate the benefits of EU membership for both Cypriots and Turks alike. Basically I think barring an unexpected rush for a solution by 1 May, that the fate of Turkey will be played out by who wins the argument between the military old guard and the elected government in that country. I say old guard because there is evidence that the military is changing, and certainly the more Turkey implements the necessary reforms for joining the EU, the more the military mindset will change too.

Whereas once it was in Turkey’s self-interest to have a divided Cyprus – and it has also been in the interests of Greece, the United States and even Britain at times in the past – it is certainly not in Turkey’s interest to keep Cyprus divided today. Why? Because when prime minister Erdogan stands in his office and looks at the map of Turkey sprawling out in front of him, he asks the question how am I going to improve the lives of the masses of rural Turks who gave me this historic democratic majority? The answer is EU membership and he knows, because the Irish prime minister, as EU president, told him in not so many words this week, that without solving Cyprus it is not going to happen.

By contrast, if he keeps implementing the reforms and secures a version of the Annan Plan, Turkey’s accession bid will reach a point of no return, when EU countries can no longer consider rejecting Ankara without undermining everything the European system stands for and sending a dangerous message to the Muslim world.

Irish minister of state for Europe Dick Roche summed up the logic of EU membership when he spoke about its effects on Northern Ireland last year. He said membership had stimulated a growing and significant degree of co-operation between the islands of Ireland and Britain. “We live together…off the coast of Europe” and “it makes sense that we face the common problems in a co-ordinated and concerted manner,” he said.

Recently we have seen an extraordinary demonstration of friendship and co-operation by one-time bitter foes France and Germany, when Chancellor Schroeder, because he could not attend one important meeting at the European summit in October, invited Jacques Chirac to speak for him.

I hope it will not be many years now before Cyprus, Greece and Turkey, all as members of the EU will be pursuing their common interests as an Eastern Mediterranean bloc and that people across Europe will be sitting up and watching how these three countries are demonstrating something remarkable to the conflict prone world of the Middle East and beyond: that Muslim and Christian nations can flourish economically, culturally and politically in a thriving partnership with each other inside Europe. When that happens we will know that Europe has become much more than a place, and that Cypriots are cultivating a lasting peace.

Brendan O’Malley is co-author with Ian Craig of The Cyprus Conspiracy: America, Espionage and the Turkish invasion, IB Tauris

He is also international editor of The Times Educational Supplement

Copyright of Brendan O’Malley

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