Could Turkey Make Northern Cyprus Its 82nd Province?

Negotiations to end the decades-long partition of the critically-located Mediterranean island of Cyprus are set to enter a new and theoretically critical stage this week in Geneva. There have been many ‘final stages’ since the island was divided between Turks and Greeks following the intervention of the Turkish military in 1974. But there are great hopes, at least by international negotiators, that this ‘final stage’ just might work.

Much has happened since 1974, including the internationally recognized Republic of Cyprus – the Greek part of the island – joining the European Union. The northern, Turkish part of the island, remains internationally isolated, recognized only by Turkey. The Turkish part of the island survives on hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidies from Turkey. The Greek part of the island has recovered from its financial meltdown and is buoyed by the promise of natural gas in its territorial waters.

Will the island re-unite or be split completely?

The rough outline of the Plan A solution to the island has been well known for decades. It would involve the Turks giving up some land, compensation for people on both sides who lost property, keeping some sort of local autonomy for the Turks, and ending years of economic and political isolation by joining the southern part of the island in the EU.  Sounds logical – to the outsider. But the deep, underlying distrust and dislike between the two communities have always been major barriers to this settlement.

Furthermore, there is the very sticky issue of ‘guarantors’ – those three countries of Greece, the UK, and Turkey who were supposed to ‘guarantee’ the stability of the island. This guarantor system failed spectacularly in 1974 when the Turkish army landed to protect the Turkish minority – and in the process left several thousand troops on the island who remain to this day. If there is a settlement what happens to this guarantor system? Will the Turkish troops leave the island? Will the Turks accept the security of the European Union instead of the security of their own troops?

Will they actually leave the island?

            However, beyond all these island-based issues there is a real elephant in the room that could scuttle all hopes of a deal. That elephant is the political maneuvering in Turkey to change the governing system of the country to give President Tayyip Erdoğan unfettered, unchallenged, unchecked power. Turkey's prime minister and parliament would be reduced to feeble rubber stamps with this change.

            In order to get the votes he needs in parliament to pass the constitutional changes Erdoğan needs the support of the Nationalist Party – a party who not only hates the Kurds but loathes the very idea of a settlement on Cyprus that includes the reduction or complete withdrawal of Turkish troops from the island. Even with the support of the Nationalist Party the issue is a near run thing. Several members of the Nationalist Party have balked at supporting changes reducing parliament to an afterthought. And there are even reports, nothing more, of ruling party AKP members who don’t like the idea of an all-powerful president.

            Assuming the bill passes parliament, there will be a national referendum to approve or reject the change to a presidential system. While Turkish polls are unreliable at best, a leading poll shows support for the referendum falling short of the required 50% + 1. Failure at the referendum stage would be a disaster for Erdoğan by puncturing his aura of invincibility and denying him the power he so blatantly wants. This he cannot allow.

            Thus, the elephant in the room of the Cyprus negotiations. Erdoğan could easily whip up nationalist sentiment in Turkey (not hard to do) by stonewalling any change in Cyprus. The brilliant Turkish journalist Metin Munir – now reporting from the safety of Cyprus because no paper in Turkey has the nerve to publish his work – says there is a Plan B being actively discussed in Ankara. That plan is simply to annex the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus making it Turkey’s 82^nd province if negotiations fail. Such a move may bring international condemnation, but would be immensely popular among the nationalist Turks.

He would sell himself as the great savior of our valiant Cypriot brothers and win the referendum in a landslide. Any opposition would be drowned in cries of national traitors, tools of foreign powers seeking to destroy Turkey. Such a campaign would be ugly but effective.

            International condemnation of such a move would have no impact whatsoever. It would only strengthen the deeply ingrained feeling that a Turk has no friends but a Turk. Erdoğan would loudly point out that the world did nothing to stop Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Therefore, why should he even listen to any criticism? The European Union would howl and scream. But so what? Turkish/EU relations were already at a dead-end. How much worse could they get? Greece would complain bitterly. But Greece is in no position to do very much. What would the United States do? That’s a very good question. No one has a clue at this point about Trump’s foreign policy which so far has been limited to 140-character tweets. Besides, right now most Turks think that America is behind every problem that Turkey is facing. Russia? Who knows? Putin is currently manipulating Erdoğan brilliantly. But will that manipulation extend to allowing dismemberment of Cyprus?

            Threatening Turkey with harsh economic sanctions won’t work. The Turkish people will gladly suffer mere economic hardship to preserve what they see as national honor. And furthermore, Putin will simply move into any vacuum created by Western isolation of Turkey.

            Any possible settlement on Cyprus is going to have to pay as much attention to political fine tuning in Ankara as it does to developments on the island itself.

The Syrian Situation Just Got More Complicated

Besides clearly demonstrating the utter hypocrisy of both Turkish and Russian actions in Syria, the destruction of the Russian fighter plane by the Turkish Air Force demonstrates the complexity of forming any coalition to defeat ISIS. It is almost impossible to find a formula that fits everyone’s agenda, especially Turkey’s, in Syria.

According to Turkish sources the Russian plane was in Turkish air space along the northern Syrian border for all of 17 seconds. Given the uneven nature of the border at that point it is hard enough to stay on the Turkish side on foot let alone in a jet fighter travelling at more than the speed of sound. None less than Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan recognized this reality in July 2012 when Syrian forces downed a Turkish fighter plane. The BBC reported his comments then that “A short term border violation can never be a pretext for an attack.” And now? What has changed?

Turkey has a great deal to lose by alienating Russia.  Russian President Vladimir Putin has many levers to use against Turkey if he chooses. For one thing, almost all of Turkey’s natural gas comes from Russia. And more than three million Russian tourists come to Turkey every year, almost filling the massive hotels along the southern coast. In addition, countless Turkish businesses operate in Russia which is also a key market for Turkish exports. Russia could also decide to use this incident as an excuse to annoy Turkey by helping the Syrian Kurds in their fight against ISIS.

            So why did Turkey take such a risky step when it could just as easily have overlooked the temporary border violation and sent a sternly worded memo that the Russians would have filed in circular bin?

 

Dangerous Escalation In SyrIa

            The most obvious, and least credible, is that Turkey was defending its homeland. Scrambling a few fighters to ‘guide’ the Russian plane out of Turkish air space could have accomplished that. A more credible explanation is that this incident demonstrates the completely different objectives of Russia and Turkey in Syria. Russia has committed money and military might to prop up Syrian president Hafez al-Assad. Turkey demands that al-Assad’s departure is a requirement for any settlement.

            Rather than focusing on defeating ISIS, Russian planes, for their part, have been attacking those anti-Assad forces, mainly in the north western part of the country, that are friendly with Turkey. This annoys Erdoğan greatly, especially as he considers some of those anti-Assad forces to be distant cousins of the Turks. Therefore, shooting down a Russian fighter plane in that area could be seen as a warning not to attack the Turkmens. A dangerous step, because history has repeatedly shown that Russians tend to react harshly to threats.

            Conspiracy theorists, never in short supply in that region, go one step further and say that the attack is Erdoğan’s attempt to derail any grand coalition to destroy the barbaric ISIS forces by making it harder for Turkey’s NATO allies America and France to join forces with Russia against ISIS.

Turkey has a complicated relationship with ISIS, and so far has devoted much more rhetoric than military action against the group. This could reflect Erdoğan’s preference for ISIS rather than the Kurds along Turkey’s southern border, but it also reflects that fact that some of his political base views ISIS positively. Twice in the last month there have been ugly incidents at Turkish football matches when a moment of silence for victims of ISIS attacks in Ankara as well as Paris has been interrupted by a group of fans whistling abuse or shouting loudly “Allah-u Ekber.” Erdoğan’s criticism of this atrocious disrespect was muted at best.

Turkey will go to great lengths to prevent the Kurds in Syria from creating an autonomous region along its southern border even if the Kurds have been the most effective anti-ISIS force. Turkey is already annoyed at American support for the Kurds, and it would be doubly annoyed to see increased support from France and Russia in the name of an anti-ISIS coalition.

Add to this Turkey’s role as a transit point for refugees and you begin to see the volatile mixture that complicates any potential settlement of the Syrian issue. It is no longer just about the Syria we used to know or the future of al-Assad and his clan of Alawites. Now you have to include the contradictory agendas of several different regional and global players – agendas that include sharp religious differences, hopes for political autonomy, and national security.

Three years ago I wrote a post about Dr. Haitham Manna, one of the early opponents of the Assad regime, and how he was strongly opposed to foreign intervention into what he considered a Syrian civil war. His concern was that the foreigners would turn a Syrian conflict into their conflict. How right he was.

Cyprus Badly Misplayed Its Hand

Cyprus has just learned a very old lesson the very hard way – nations don’t have friends, they only have interests. Assuming protection for the last decade from its membership in the European Union, the Euro zone, and close ties to Russian oligarchs Cyprus tried to remake itself as a global financial service center and a significant regional political player. Whatever productive businesses it had were wound down in favor of a service-based economy. Cypriot politicians mistakenly thought their consistent support of Russian stances on issues like Kosovo and Syria would earn them Russian protection when times got hard.  Wrong.

Cyprus just learned a hard lesson

These delusions were brutally punctured when a remorseless European Union led by Germany forced a complete restructuring of the island’s unsustainable banking system in return for helping rescue the country’s battered finances. This restructuring will lead to failed businesses and large losses for many savers, including thousands of Russians who thought Cyprus was a safe place to stash their funds protected by the notoriously incurious Cypriot financial regulators. Essentially, the island’s economy is back to Square One.

Cypriots were ‘shocked, shocked’ that their fellow EU members would do this to them. They were even more shocked when the Russians, demonstrating a bit of real politick, showed they valued their relations with the EU more than their Cypriot ties and refused to help, leaving the island nation well and truly in the lurch.

This plea fell on deaf ears

The Cypriots badly misread their presumed support from the EU. The reality was that many EU countries deeply resented Cypriot membership in the first place and were increasingly annoyed at the lax financial regulation on the island. In 2004 Greece essentially threatened to veto the entire EU expansion project unless Cyprus was included. Greece and Cyprus won the short-term game, but lost longer term support. No one likes being blackmailed. The Germans in particular did not want to accept a country that was divided by the break-away Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in the north and the Republic of Cyprus in the south.

The Cypriots did not help their reputation when they overwhelming rejected a plan to unify the island just before they were admitted to the EU. Cyprus further overplayed its hand by consistently blocking any closer relations between the EU, NATO and Turkey. What began as a major victory for Hellenism in 2004 has sadly turned to dust as both Greece and Cyprus, largely through their own doing, are now little more than wards of the humourless northern Europeans.

In a twist that only the gods could arrange, Cyprus’s implosion has coincided with major strides forward by its arch-enemy Turkey. While Cypriots leaders were desperately shuttling between Nicosia, Brussels and Moscow seeking bail out money Turkey not only made a major breakthrough in the peace process with the Kurds but succeeded in amending its torn relations with Israel. At a stroke, the geopolitics of the Middle East changed. Turkey, whose economy is humming along quite nicely, re-established itself as a credible, powerful force in the ever-changing dynamics of the Middle East.

The implications of these developments for Cyprus are mixed at best. Israel now could be much more interested in shipping the gas from its offshore field to Turkey rather than Cyprus. Turkey has long protested that Cyprus should not develop its own gas fields without taking into consideration the Turkish population of the island. Now that Turkey is finally living up to its potential as a regional power more countries and major oil companies could be willing to consider the Turkish position before doing more work on the offshore Cyprus gas fields. Certainly countries like Germany and Russia have many more strategic interests in Turkey than they do in Cyprus. And they most likely would not like to jeopardize those interests for the sake of Cypriot gas.

Cyprus is in a tough neighborhood

There is at least one step Cypriot leaders could take that could restore their credibility and possibly lay the foundation for recovery. They could think the unthinkable and work out a deal to re-unify the island. After nearly 40 years of division following the Turkish military incursion this will by no means be easy. One of the more thankless jobs for any diplomat since 1974 has been to seek peace between the two sides of Cyprus. The best chance came in 2004 when a plan supported by former United Nations General Secretary Kofi Annan was overwhelmingly supported by the Turkish side and just as overwhelmingly rejected by Greek Cypriots after a vigorous ‘No’ campaign led by former president Tassos Papadopoulos.

Such reunification talks would undoubtedly be challenging. Much has changed over the last several years on the island and the two sides no longer have much in common. Cyprus also would be negotiating directly with Ankara rather than with just the Turkish Cypriots. Touchy issues include the presence of the Turkish military that by now has built up a substantial infrastructure on the island, restitution of Greek Cypriot property seized in 1974, the status of the thousands of immigrants from the Turkish mainland that have been settled on the island, and many, many others. But Turkey has reasons of its own for wanting a settlement. Currently it spends about $600 million a year to support the Turkish part of Cyprus, money it can ill afford to spend. It has been unable to get a single country to recognize the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, and its negotiations with the EU have been hindered by Cyprus for several years. Also, the Turkish military is in a much weaker position than it was in 2004. It is no longer in a position to block a settlement and pretty much does whatever Prime Minister Erdoğan says.

The economic and political benefits of a unified island just might push the parties toward the negotiating table. Now that the former Cypriot economic model is broken beyond repair the political leaders might be willing to re-think the unification issue. This would require leadership and statesmanship that so far have been in short supply. But in this case necessity might just the catalyst for welcome change.

Forget Plan 'B', They Need Plan 'A'

The ruthless Syrian regime may be losing the international public relations war. But it is slowly and viciously grinding down the remnants of opposition, and remains entrenched  in power.  It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Just as in Libya the forces of ‘good’ in the world were supposed to use their power and prestige to help the long-suffering Syrian people free themselves from the strangle-hold of a despotic regime. Instead, Syria is proving to be the place where the so-called Arab Spring could turn into the deep freeze of the Arab Winter.

Our friend Rainer Hermann, long-time Middle East correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, is in frequent contact with all sides in the Syrian conflict and offers valuable insights into the problems there. Rainer speaks fluent Arabic, and his constant travels throughout the region and huge list of contacts give him a unique and valuable perspective on these developments.

The first problem facing the opposition groups is that the bulk of the Syrian army is remaining loyal to the regime. A few soldiers and a handful of officers have defected to the opposition, but so far the vast bulk of the military together with all the heavy weapons remain with the regime. The opposition is left with light weapons and dedicated volunteers who are no match for a trained military force willing to resort to any degree of barbarity to stay in power. There is no quarter in this battle, no compromise possible where the leadership of the military is closely allied with the minority Alawite regime. The military leadership realizes its future would be grim indeed if the majority Sunni part of the population were to assume control.

The second major problem is that the opposition is bitterly divided. Various groups and a myriad of splinter groups often cannot even sit in the same room, let alone decide on a common strategy. Some want a stronger military presence, others demand negotiations with the regime. Many of the local coordinating councils detest the national council. Many resent those who spend all their time talking with foreign diplomats instead of fighting on the ground. Essentially, there is no common platform, and the opposition has been unable to convince the ‘silent majority’ to join the struggle. Many of the Syrian bourgeois middle class are remaining on the sidelines unconvinced that the opposition has a clear plan, let alone a decent chance to succeed and install a regime any better than the one they already have.

“Forget Plan B. There’s no Plan A,” one frustrated Syrian friend said.

This critical mass of people may not like the Al-Assad regime, but they like the confusion that followed uprisings in Egypt and Libya even less. We have Christian Arab friends in London who are very nervous about the potential for fundamental Sunni control of Syria.

“Up to now, the Christians in Syria have had a decent time. The churches and monasteries are open. No one hassles them. Look at Egypt now. See how the Copts are being mistreated. The Western countries have no idea what will follow the overthrow of Al-Assad. They have to be very careful,” our neighbour said.

The third major problem faced by the opposition is the complete paralysis of the international community. Remember Bosnia? This is just as bad. There has been a torrent of words, but so far precious little action. The Al-Assad regime can hide behind its Russian and Chinese protectors and ignore the pious protests from the European Union, the United States, and the toothless United Nations. A few U.S. senators have called for military intervention, but fortunately cooler heads have prevailed. One hopes the Americans have learned the dangers of ‘regime change’ forced from the outside.

Turkey is in a very difficult position. Thousands of Syrian refugees have fled across the border into Turkey. The Turkish government has turned against its one-time friend Bashar Al-Assad and issues daily verbal thunderbolts against him. There is a lot of loose talk about the Turkish army setting up a buffer zone inside Syrian to protect civilians caught in the middle. I doubt very much that Turkey would ever act on its own. The geopolitical/economic balances in this part of the world are extremely delicate. Turkey’s large Kurdish population is already restive, and the militant wing of fighters in the PKK shows no sign of giving up its attacks. However unlikely, the last thing Turkey needs is for Syria to start helping the Turkish Kurds in retaliation for any incursion by the Turkish military. Then there is Iran, also a strong supporter of the Al-Assad regime. Turkish – Iranian relations are already tense, and any overt move against Syria would only heighten those tensions.

The hard, cruel fact is that right now there is no obvious solution. The only thing that is clear at this point is that any sustainable solution is going to have to come from within Syria itself. Outside intervention on behalf of the opposition is just not going to happen. If the opposition could unite and develop a common platform for a non-Assad Syria the hitherto ‘silent majority’ might just become a little less silent and lend its voice to the opposition. But that, unfortunately, is a very big ‘if’.