An International Relations Debacle: The UN Secretary-General's Mission of Good Offices in Cyprus, 1999-2004 (review)

Claire Palley's An International Relations Debacle, with its contextual subtitle, The UN Secretary-General's Mission of Good Offices in Cyprus, 1999–2004, is a book about modern Cypriot political history and the pivotal role of the United Nations in its making that no student of the eastern Mediterranean or of the UN and its "good offices" machinery can ignore or dismiss. Its pages are packed with original materials and documents that are extensively and painstakingly footnoted and indexed. Included also are nine appendices running over one hundred pages. One of these, appendix six, is a meticulously assembled table comparing the various modifications of the UN Annan Plan for Cyprus that only a legal expert or another insider with years of involvement and archival access could have prepared.

Any objective assessment of the book must factor in not merely the author's professional background but also her two-decades-long involvement with Cyprus. Palley is by training a comparative constitutional lawyer, a former United Kingdom member of the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (1988 to 1998) and former constitutional consultant to the president of Cyprus (1980 to 2004). She in fact resigned from the latter post for the specific purpose of writing this book, and she so forewarns her readers. She furthermore acknowledges that she is an advocate of a pro-Cypriot perspective. The argument she sets about to substantiate, and does so satisfactorily, is that the Annan Plan in its various incarnations, and particularly in its fifth and final version (Annan V), was a specifically orchestrated attempt to legitimize the fruits of the 1974 Turkish attack on Cyprus that forced one-third of the indigenous population to flee their homes and properties, left the northern third of the country under Turkey's military occupation, and forced the de facto partition of a UN member-state. With the policies of Turkey in Cyprus receiving the UN seal of approval through Annan V, Ankara would have been freed of the shackles it created with the 1974 attack.

In the aftermath of the Turkish invasion, the UN secretary-general was mandated by the Security Council to use the secretariat's "good offices" machinery to remedy the situation and to reunify Cyprus, in accordance with the UN Charter and specific resolutions as well as the norms and principles of international law. Instead, charges Palley, bureaucrats in the secretariat, with the more often than not nominal approval of the secretary-general, abused and corrupted their Security Council mandate and attempted, through Annan V, to browbeat one side of the Cyprus dispute—the 80 percent Greek-Cypriot majority population—into accepting a plan that decriminalized Turkey's post-1974 behavior, ensconced the Turkish army (and also the British military) permanently on the island, legitimized the illegal presence of thousands of Turks that the Ankara government settled on Cyprus in order to alter the demography of the country, and obliged those victimized by the 1974 invasion to pay for its costs and damages. Adding insult to injury, the Annan plan would have denied Cypriots recourse to international courts for property claims and other grievances arising out of its implementation. All the while, the Annan-established new state (misnamed "United Cyprus Republic") would have acquired membership in the European Union and would have continued as an "independent" and "sovereign" member-state of the UN.

On 24 April 2004 Annan V (a staggering ten thousand pages that took its final form the day before) was placed before the Cypriots for approval and was rejected. According to agreed-upon procedure, Greek and Turkish Cypriots were to cast a "yes" or "no" vote for the plan in simultaneous but separate UN-sponsored referendums. Both referendums had to receive separate...