Europe

Baku – APA. The Turkish residents of Northern Cyprus will go to the polls to elect a new president on Sunday, APA reports quoting “Spiegel Magazine”. The future of their internationally ostracized republic, the most isolated in Europe, is at stake. A solution to the three-decade division between Greek southern Cyprus and the Turkish northern part of the island is nowhere in sight.
The president approaches, walking at a quick pace. The look on his face indicates that he has little time and a lot on his plate. He is in the process of abolishing his republic, and he hopes to convince the electorate to support his plan on April 18.
Mehmet Ali Talat is the Cumhurbaskani of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, the president of Europe’s most isolated country.
The walk to his palace in the northern section of the capitl Nicosia leads past barbed wire fences and ruins. Mail and telephone calls can only reach Northern Cyprus through Turkey, and there are no flight connections to the rest of the continent.
In the eyes of the international community, the republic proclaimed by Talat in 1983 doesn’t exist, or at least it isn’t supposed to exist. So far only Ankara has sent an ambassador to this northern section of the last divided capital in Europe. The representatives of other European countries have their offices south of the line of demarcation, only a short walk away in the Republic of Cyprus, which is part of the European Union.
The Mediterranean island gained its independence from colonial rule half a century ago. There has been a cease-fire along the border that separates Turkish and Greek-speaking residents since 1974. Cyprus has been a member of the EU since 2004, but the northern part of the island remains under diplomatic quarantine.
Patience Is at an End
The president, who has no status abroad, sits down in his armchair and says: "Time is running out. We had intended to solve the problem by the beginning of this year. But the Greek Cypriots aren’t cooperating."
Talat’s goal is a Cypriot federation with a central government and a shared flag. Sunday’s presidential election in the Turkish north will also be a referendum on Talat’s proposal. After five years in office and tough negotiations with the south, Talat faces a vote in which he may not get reelected. His opponent, Dervis Eroglu, advocates a less compromising approach toward the island’s Greeks. But a solution is necessary, one way or the other, says President Talat. The citizens’ patience is at an end, he says, and the upshot could very well be "permanent partition."
It would mark the end of a decades-long tug-of-war. In 1974 Cyprus, with three-quarters of its population made up of ethnic Greeks, became a battlefield between two NATO partners when the president, Archbishop Makarios, was ousted in a coup backed by the military junta in Athens. To prevent Greece’s imminent annexation of Cyprus, Turkish troops occupied the northern third of the island. Some 6,000 people died in the ensuing conflict, and close to 200,000 were displaced -- Greeks from the north into the south, and Turks in the opposite direction.
Since then, Cyprus has been ethnically cleansed. In 2004, the island’s Turks approved the then United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan’s plan to form a federation, but the Greek Cypriots turned it down. At Athens’ instigation, they had been promised another option: EU membership, without the constraint of sealing a deal with their Turkish-speaking neighbors first.
The Turkish Cypriots have become the stepchildren of a united Europe. Although Northern Cyprus has been a "de jure" member of the EU for the past six years, EU law is "suspended" there.
This is one of the reasons the north has increasingly attracted people who are looking for something special: a human trafficker to smuggle people into EU territory or a fictitious address, inexpensive plots of land with ocean views, deceptively genuine-looking Louis Vuitton bags and casinos that are open until the early morning hours.
They sleep in shifts in the north. Soon after the last chips have been collected in the casinos and the first call to prayer has rung out from the Selimiye Mosque, a crowd of border crossers is already on the move: electricians, plumbers and bricklayers heading for EU territory. On the other side of the line of demarcation, they are loaded onto delivery trucks and taken to construction sites in the south. Thousands cross the border and return home in the evening on a daily basis. The Greeks pay twice as much as the Turkish workers can earn at home.
Some 80,000 Turkish Cypriots, or about one-third of the population in the north, now have EU passports. They can obtain health insurance and have their teeth pulled in the south, and they can also board direct flights to other countries. Another 80,000 or so northern Cypriots are able to cross the border, which has been open since 2003, with an identification card from their pariah republic.
No Breakthrough in Sight
Talat has negotiated on neutral ground with his Greek counterpart an average of once a week since September 2008. The negotiations have revolved around the role of the Turkish army, the location of the boundary line and tens of thousands of pieces of property whose owners were forced to flee during the war. The 71st round of negotiations, held last Tuesday, was the last before the election. But even after that, Talat was unable to announce a breakthrough on the road to promised unification.
Meanwhile, the chief negotiators have developed a very good relationship with each other. Both Talat and Dimitris Christofias, the Greek president of the Republic of Cyprus, are from the Kyrenia region, now known as Girne, in the northern part of the island. And like Talat, Christofias is considered a reformer and defends his plans for a federation against powerful opponents in the national council.
Some 1,400 Greek Cypriots have filed petitions with the European Court of Human Rights for the return of their property in the north, and €70 million ($94 million) in compensation has been paid. No money flows in the other direction, not officially, at least. The Republic of Cyprus is holding properties formerly owned by Turks "in trust" until the conflict is fully resolved, or it simply compensates the former Turkish owners, as in the case of a Turkish Cypriot who fled to England and received more than a half-million euros under the table.
’Our People Do Not Have the Same Rights’
Citizens of the ostracized northern republic cannot take their cases to court. "It is a disgrace," says the president. "Our people do not have the same rights, and they are being put off." If the situation were different, it could get expensive. For example, the land on which the old airport in the southern Cypriot city of Larnaka, and parts of the new one, were built -- a destination for more than five million tourists a year -- belongs to Turkish Cypriots.
In the north, on the other hand, 30,000 villas and apartments were built within a few years, in a gold rush unhampered by environmental laws or zoning plans. Soner Yetkili, head of the developers’ association, mentions €1.5 billion in sales within a short period of time. "But now the sector is dead, and 8,000 units are empty." Properties encumbered by the claims of their former owners are now being sold to risk-friendly foreigners at discount prices.
When President Talat drives along the coast to his weekend home, he sees mile after mile of cookie-cutter villas with red roofs, scattered like mushrooms along the hillsides of the Five Finger Mountains. He drives past the fortress-like villa of media czar Asil Nadir, who Great Britain wants extradited for embezzling £34 million. A few kilometers down the road, he passes brothels with girls from Eastern Europe, known as kiss-me-quick clubs. The prostitutes are allowed to enter the country on "artists’ visas" and are required to undergo weekly health checkups.
Turkish Troops
When asked if Northern Cyprus is a republic in which the shadow economy is blossoming under the eyes of Turkish military officials, President Talal looks annoyed. "That isn’t correct," he says. "What does the Turkish army have to say here? Nothing, except when it comes to military questions."
Turkey, Greece and Great Britain, the former colonial power, are the guarantor powers in Cyprus. Ankara maintains 30,000 troops on the island. The troop deployment consumes a substantial portion of the estimated €1 billion Turkey pays to Northern Cyprus, which is isolated from the global market and cannot earn enough money to sustain itself exporting citrus fruits and catering to 350,000 tourists a year.
Adventurers from around the world have established their letterbox companies in the Famagusta Free Port, "because no one here checks to see what you’re doing," as a German lottery operator admits. Gerhard Steinbach, an investment advisor from the eastern German city of Leipzig, was also using a local firm to handle his business here. In late March, after being arrested on charges of embezzling €9 million, Steinbach committed suicide in his cell.
’It’s Like a Second Turkish Military Operation against Us’
Being an international pariah, the Republic of Northern Cyprus is unable to sign "treaties or UN conventions," according to a 2009 report by the US State Department’s counterterrorism unit. One of the unit’s goals is to dry up this fertile ground for money laundering, the drug trade and the "infiltration of terrorist groups."
In 2008, the European Commission, the EU’s executive, concluded that 5,710 illegal immigrants made their way to the south within a year. One-third of those who made it across the line of demarcation were Syrians who had previously traveled to Northern Cyprus by plane or on the ferry from Latakia on the Syrian coast. According to Doros Polykarpou, director of the refugee organization Kisa, 80,000 legal and 30,000 illegal foreigners now live in the Republic of Cyprus. He believes that the immigrants, most of them from the Middle East, are destabilizing the EU country. "It’s like a second Turkish military operation against us."
Rauf Denktash -- who steered northern Cyprus’ fortunes for decades as its leader after declaring independence following the 1974 Turkish invasion up until 2004 -- has a different view: He claims that Europe has created its own problem. The Republic of Northern Cyprus is his baby and he remains proud of it today. He’s infamous as "Mister No" because of his uncompromising positions, but even today, at 86 years of age, he’s still in demand as an oracle on the Cyprus conflict.
’You Can’t Sign an Agreement with a Republic that Doesn’t Exist’
"Healing," he says, "is impossible without a proper diagnosis." He says people often forget how the conflict took shape. "The war didn’t first break out in 1974," he says. "Ten years earlier, the US wanted Cyprus to go to the Greeks, despite the fact that Archbishop Makarios, this Cypriot Milosevic, had violated the requirement of equal treatment in our constitution. If we hadn’t formed this republic, the whole island would still be controlled by the Greek Cypriots. But what did the EU do in 2004? It allowed itself to be blackmailed by the Greeks and accepted Cyprus as a member state."
By agreeing, they were able to prevent a veto from Athens against the other nine EU accession candidates, but it also meant shelving, at least for a time, a solution to the North Cyprus conflict. The EU assuaged its conscience about Northern Cyprus by offering an aid package totalling €259 million. New air quality measuring stations, sewage pipes and handicap access ramps in front of run-down churches are evidence of that aid.
Still, during her most recent visit to Ankara, German Chancellor Angela Merkel once again clarified the EU’s uncompromising position on the tiresome Cyprus conflict: Concessions for a solution to the Cyprus conflict would largely have to come from the Turkish side. In addition, further steps in the negotiations for Turkey’s accession to the Union could only begin if Ankara opened its ports to Greek Cypriot ships. The EU was important to his country, Turkish Minister for EU Affairs Egemen Bagis had said previously, but "not important enough to sacrifice Cyprus."
Half a century after its independence, will the Mediterranean island begin moving toward a new political ice age once the ballots have been counted in the north on Sunday? In any event, prospects are not good for a solution materializing anytime soon.
It has been 36 years since the war ended, and yet "there is not even an official ceasefire agreement on this island," says President Talat. This is incomprehensible, from his point of view, but logical from the standpoint of the Greek Cypriots, who say: "You can’t sign an agreement with a republic that doesn’t exist."

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