Fifty-two years ago on July 20, Turkey invaded Cyprus. A succession of Turkish leaders’ claims that they did so to protect Cyprus’s Muslim minority was never credible; the bulk of Turkey’s invasion, land grabs, and ethnic cleansing occurred following a ceasefire and amidst ongoing peace talks.
While the occupation of Cyprus enjoys broad support across Turkey’s political spectrum, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has taken the consolidation of Turkey’s imperialism to a new level: He has attacked peacekeepers in Pyla and violated the decades-long status quo in Varosha. Meanwhile, Turkey has continued to pour tens of thousands of settlers into northern Cyprus. Culturally, the poor Anatolian Turks whom Erdoğan uses to pad the numbers in Cyprus are different from the native Cypriots who have called Cyprus home for centuries. Cypriot Muslims have more in common with Cypriot Greeks than they do with Anatolian Turks, who often import an Islamism foreign to Cyprus itself.
While the occupation of Cyprus enjoys broad support across Turkey’s political spectrum, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has taken the consolidation of Turkey’s imperialism to a new level.
As the occupation has continued for decades, many within the international community have accepted the occupation as the new normal. Nearly all United Nations peacekeepers along the line of control between Cyprus and the occupied zone were born after the Turkish invasion. So were most of the diplomats whose portfolio is Cyprus. For other diplomats, it is a question of realpolitik. The total population of Cyprus, including the occupied zones, is less than 1.5 million. Turkey’s population, in comparison, now nears 90 million. And while Cyprus maintains only a small national guard, Turkey is a NATO member with an active duty army of nearly one-half million.
Over generations, diplomats have shifted from calls for Turkey to withdraw immediately. U.N. Security Council Resolution 353 (1974), which passed unanimously, called for ceasefire and an immediate “end to foreign military intervention.” Over subsequent years, however, various proposals have sought creative solutions. Each initiative, even when not successful, shaped the agenda for future talks.
In 1977, Archbishop Makarios III, the president of Cyprus, and Rauf Denktaş, the leader of the occupied zone, spoke about a bicommunal federal republic, albeit with economic viability and property rights shaping respective control. In essence, this meant the reversal of the ethnic cleansing the Turkish army perpetrated. Two years later, Denktaş agreed with Makarios’s successor, Spyros Kyprianou, to foreswear union of any Cypriot territory to other countries: Greece could not annex Greek-populated areas, and Turkey could not annex those zones it occupied.
In 1983, the northern Cypriot parliament declared the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus as an independent state that Turkey, then led by the military-appointed Prime Minister Bülend Ulusu, recognized. The Turks’ action set the precedent for what Russia would later do with the Donetsk and Luhansk Peoples’ Republics when Russian invaders cleaved off Ukrainian territory. Such unilateralism shattered any accrued confidence in negotiations and likely reflected that the Turkish side had always been playing for time, rather than seeking the solution.
The United Nations took over, brokering indirect talks. In 1989, U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, frustrated by the lack of progress, crafted his own ideas for a solution. He proposed a federal republic that would balance national and local authority. While Perez de Cuellar may have been well-meaning, the desire to force concessions to break the deadlock rewarded Turkey for its aggression: Cyprus lost authority, while Turkey’s Vichy zone on Cyprus gained legitimacy.
On May 13, 1990, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution endorsing the idea of a bicommunal, bizonal Cyprus and formally empowering the secretary-general to initiate new ideas to break the impasse. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali proposed a bicameral legislature with a 70:30 ration of Greeks to Cypriots in the lower house, and the upper house divided evenly. The federal executive would also operate with a 70:30 ration of Greek to Turkish Cypriots. Boutros-Ghali also guaranteed that each authority would rule respectively over a Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot population. While that might sound fair at the U.N.’s New York headquarters, the secretary-general essentially blessed existing ethnic cleansing.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan drafted a new plan which he unveiled as “The Basis for Agreement on a Comprehensive Settlement of the Cyprus Problem,” commonly known as the Annan Plan. It outlined a complicated system of rotations and proportions loosely based on the Swiss federal system. Greek Cypriots objected to the legitimization of past ethnic cleansing and the plan’s failure to address the Turkish settlers who likely already outnumbered the legitimate Cypriot Muslim population. Cypriots overwhelmingly rejected the plan in a referendum because of those concerns and the U.N.’s failure to outline enforcement mechanisms. They feared making concessions, only to have Turkey reinforce its garrison on the island. The Cypriot concerns were valid, especially given the U.N.’s track record of responding to intransigence with further compromise.
Erdoğan alternates between dividing Cyprus between two independent states and lamenting that Turkey did not complete its Anschluss.
Today, the pattern repeats. Erdoğan alternates between dividing Cyprus between two independent states and lamenting that Turkey did not complete its Anschluss. Now, the United Nations is at it again. María Ángela Holguín, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’s personal envoy for Cyprus, will soon unveil a deal that she claims will resolve problems with “constructive ambiguity.” Put aside that such ambiguity is malpractice. It gets people killed and will sow the seeds for generations of conflict.
The problem is that Guterres and Holguín are so focused on Cyprus in isolation that they ignore the precedent they risk setting. As the United Nations proposes yet another solution that would retroactively legitimatize and reward Turkey’s occupation, Erdoğan demands revision of maritime boundaries, if not territorial control in the Aegean. If the U.N. plan goes forward, Turkey would be right to believe that it can achieve its Aegean aims militarily, winning international approval if it simply waits long enough. Nor would Ankara necessarily need to wait, because Turkish diplomats and perhaps U.S. Ambassador Tom Barrack would readily and repeatedly cite the Cypriot precedent to award Turkey possession of Greek islands they ethnically cleanse.
Too often, U.N. officials and European diplomats associate compromise with sophistication. What they really do, however, is malpractice. There should be no solution to Cyprus that does not first require the evacuation of every single Turkish troop and Turkish settler on the island and the resumption of full Cypriot sovereignty over the entirety of the country’s territory.
