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Cyprus: Annan Plan

My Lords, I was very interested to hear what the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, had to say. It gave us a lot of food for thought. I was rather surprised that in his brief historical summary, the noble Lord, Lord Faulkner of Worcester, failed to mention that the Greek Cypriots started to flout the provisions of the Zurich treaties almost before the ink was dry on the documents. The   Turkish Government were quite extraordinarily restrained in failing to intervene to protect their fellow Turks until 1974, with the brief exception of a small air raid upon Greek irregulars attacking Turkish villages in north-western Cyprus in January 1964, if I remember rightly. In listing this week’s parliamentary debates, last week’s Westminster and Whitehall World, a quasi-official publication after all, summarised this debate as being,"““on human rights in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus””," thereby suggesting to the uninitiated that it would be   all about the Turkish Cypriot Government’s repression of their own people. I have no doubt that that is nothing but an uncharacteristic slip-up by that journal’s editorial department, but it epitomises just how the dice always seem to be loaded against the Turkish Cypriots in the great propaganda war. Some nations, races, religions and groupings are inherently better at PR than others and more able to switch on the charm at will, as the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis, and his fellow Unionists know to their cost. I thank the noble Lord for giving us the chance to debate the appallingly unfair treatment of Turkish Cypriots, who had shown their good faith and willingness to compromise. A great deal of hard work and ingenuity went into the Annan plan, which surely provided for the best medium-term settlement that was realistically available. It is the greatest pity that the Greek Cypriots rejected it and did so by an extremely wide margin. As the noble Lord, Lord Maginnis, said, the reason for the rejection was ostensibly the slowness of withdrawal of Turkish troops for which the plan provided. I am not convinced. The unwise acceptance of Greek Cyprus into the EU before a settlement has made Greek Cypriots feel overconfident and almost invulnerable. They feel that they hold all the cards. Moreover, from private conversations that my acquaintances have had with Greek Cypriots, it seems clear that most of them—not all, but most—regard Turkish Cypriots in the same way as the British tended to regard the Irish in the last half of the nineteenth century and the earlier years of the twentieth: either as obstreperous troublemakers or as thick peasants who are totally devoid of any managerial or entrepreneurial abilities. I know that the latter is complete rubbish, but, nevertheless, it is clearly a widely held perception in the south, which fears having to subsidise the north in the event of a settlement: hence the referendum vote. There are some who say ““tough””, that somehow Turkish Cypriots will have to live with it and that realpolitik dictates that we ought to wash our hands of the matter. I suggest that this is an extremely dangerous attitude. Cyprus is located in a most volatile part of the world. The eastern tip of the Karpas peninsula is less than 60 miles from the Syrian coast. Most of northern Cyprus is less than 50 miles from the Turkish coast. The island is also near to Lebanon and quite near to Israel, Egypt and Greece in the form of Rhodes and Crete. There has been a great deal of turmoil and bloodshed in the region during the past 150 years, and it is not in anyone’s interest to add to it if it can possibly be avoided. Some will say that I am being alarmist and will contend that the British influence during almost 130   years, both before and after independence, has made Turkish Cypriots less and less like the mainland Turks, not only in superficial matters such as driving on the left, but also in becoming both more secular and less militant, and therefore more ready to give in eventually to Greek Cypriots and accept gratefully whatever crumbs fall from the Greek Cypriot table. That seems most unlikely, but I confess that I am not really in a position to be certain. My brother served in the Army in Cyprus, and a good friend worked there for a great many years and became very fluent in Greek. They both briefed me very thoroughly, but I never managed to go there myself until 1980. I went to both sides of the green line; and had a meeting with Mr Denktash, who was then governing his realm from a Nissen hut in north Nicosia, such were the austerities imposed on the Turkish areas of the island by years and years of the Greek blockade. And I spent a most fruitful day with the most impressive foreign secretary of those days. I have been back a number of times since, both to the north and to   the south—I have crossed the border at both authorised and, once or twice, unauthorised crossing points. But I confess that I have not stayed there for long periods, so I still do not know the people of the island well enough to deduce what they are really thinking at heart as distinct from what they politely reply to an inquisitive stranger. So I cannot be sure whether the assumption that Turkish Cypriots will reluctantly accept the present situation is correct or not. However, I do understand the Turks on the mainland a good deal better. As I might have mentioned in an earlier debate, I first went to Turkey 52 years ago, in 1953, as a student backpacker—as it would now be described, although not so described in those days. It was the 500th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman armies, and almost every shop and kiosk was displaying huge maps of the Ottoman empire at its greatest power and extent, between roughly 1550 and 1685. They were selling like hot cakes. There was clearly a subliminal—and indeed an overt—yearning for the days of empire and glory. Superficially, Istanbul was very cosmopolitan then, with a great many Greeks, White Russians and French-speaking Levantines. As a young Western European—and I must heavily emphasise the ““Western””—I was treated with enormous warmth and hospitality, more often than not by total strangers. Nevertheless, I could sense a certain edginess and tension in the air, so when the anti-Greek pogroms broke out two years later, I was shocked but not entirely surprised. The pogroms resulted in enormous destruction, arson and looting on a massive scale, and the death of 30 Greeks. I have been back a great many times since, covering much of the western two-thirds of the country, and although I am always struck by the honesty, kindness and essential decency of the people, have remained conscious of the very strong nationalism bubbling away beneath the surface, which can manifest itself strongly under stress. Some may argue that I am dwelling too much on the past, and that the Turks have changed and become almost like Western Europeans. It is true that rising prosperity makes people more relaxed and benign and more reluctant to get into a conflict that might jeopardise the comforts so recently acquired. It is true, too, that young Turkish males do their compulsory national service with greater reluctance than in the past. Appeals to patriotism no longer carry the weight that they once did. Yet there is a certain steel below the surface, which people who go on delegations to Istanbul and who meet only well-travelled businessmen, academics, artists and so on, may not notice. One October day in Istanbul a few years ago, I was stuck in a dreary hotel room with the rain cascading down—there must have been about four or five inches   that day—with nothing to do but watch the Independence Day celebrations on television. The word celebration implies a certain joyousness and happy smiles, but there were no happy smiles at all on that day. After a display of military might, we went on to robust men dressed in white tie and tails and almost as robust women in long evening dresses, belting out patriotic songs with fierce scowls on their faces. It made the May Day parades in Moscow in the Communist era look rather effete in comparison. I do not believe that the Turks are anything near turning into replicas of 20th century Swedes; they are nearer perhaps to 17th century Swedes, whose armies inspired almost as much fear as the Ottoman armies. The serious point that I am trying to make is that if Turkish membership of the EU looks like being rejected—and at the same time, heaven forbid, countries such as Ukraine, Serbia and Moldova are allowed in—Turkey will feel deeply humiliated and there will be hell to pay. It is no matter that EU membership may not on balance be good for Turkey, as I suspect and have suggested. The humiliation that they would feel after making such enormous efforts in vain would cause a resurgence of the militant nationalism that lies beneath the surface. The obvious outlet for such militant nationalism is bound to be Cyprus, if their fellow Turks are still being treated as second-class citizens on that island. So it is in the interests of the Greek Cypriot Government to persuade their electorate to change its mind, and to do so rapidly.