Cyprus: Search for a Solution (review)

Lord David Hannay has written a very readable book. Sadly, though, it offers nothing of real value to the Cyprus debate. Starting from a flawed concept of Cypriot history, it proceeds entertainingly to a set of flawed conclusions. That the middle, diary sections have a patina of whole-hearted objectivity does not detract from the subjectivity of the work as a whole. It will damage the Cypriot cause, and maybe help that of London, by diverting international attention from the reality of the problems that have been imposed on Cyprus. It also will strengthen a Cypriot view that Whitehall should cease to represent itself as a competent interpreter of Cypriot affairs.

Lord Hannay was the wrong man to be involved in a search for solutions in Cyprus: too clever, too arrogant in his own views, too much a product of the Whitehall establishment. He came with a reputation as a successful operator at the United Nations, as a broker of compromises rather than as an advocate of justice. In Cyprus, as was to be expected, he worked for a compromise between external interests and Cypriot rights. What Cyprus needed was a facilitator with a genuine commitment to an ethical solution—it needed a man who was answerable to the Cypriot people rather than to any outside power; it needed someone with emotional sympathy rather than intellectualism; it needed a lateral thinker rather than a practitioner of realpolitik.

Lord Hannay is an advocate of a "virgin birth" for Cyprus. He considers that Cypriot history should start from about 1990, and that thirty years of Turkish occupation and more than double that of British complicity in dividing Cyprus should be accepted as done deeds, rather than as separate issues that need to be addressed before any real process of intercommunal solution can begin.

Inherent in this book is the double standard between international pressure for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and international toleration of the continued Turkish military and intelligence presence in Cyprus. The UN and the United States have been strong in their advocacy of decolonization: is it difficult for them to understand that Britain and Turkey have effectively imposed a form of neocolonialism on Cyprus?

The constitution that was pushed onto Cyprus in 1960 was the most circumscribed and least democratic outcome of any independence process in modern history. It was based on ethnic division; it conferred on foreign powers the right to meddle in Cypriot affairs in pursuit of their own interests; it wholly failed to lay the foundations for an organic welding of the Cypriot people into a dynamic and viable partnership. In exactly similar fashion the architects of the Annan Plan have produced proposals that would require the Cypriots to accept arrangements that are in profound derogation of the norms both of the UN and of the European Union and that do nothing to encourage the island's inhabitants toward a genuine partnership.

The reason for these derogations had little to do with intercommunal problems. The massive demonstration of intercommunal compatibility at the popular level since the 2003 opening of the Green Line has laid to rest the myth, long cultivated by self-interested outsiders, that reengagement would be characterized by acrimony and violence. The nub of the difficulty in producing a proposal for Cyprus acceptable to London and Washington lies rather with the strategic interests that Britain and Turkey consider themselves to have in the island and with attempts by Washington and London to keep the Turkish army onsite.

Lord Hannay's failure to address the realities of the Turkish military's current occupation of a large section of Cyprus gives an Alice-in-Wonderland dimension to the whole of his book. He, like other British commentators, suggests that the Greek Cypriots should trust the goodwill of the Turkish army. Given that army's long-standing claim that it needs to be able to exercise an effective control over the whole of Cyprus, this suggestion would seem to be either duplicitous...