The time of hard and final decisions
When we were first starting in journalism, our older colleagues would give us a piece of advice: “Never put the Cyprus issue as the top story because it doesn’t sell.” Other veteran colleagues joked that “it is certain we will reach retirement before the Cyprus issue is resolved.”
But there is something very strange. The issue may not “sell,” but it can cause political storms in Athens. We have seen this from the time of conservative premier Konstantinos Karamanlis and the 1959 London and Zurich agreements, to socialist premier Andreas Papandreou. Let’s not forget that the only time Papandreou was forced to apologize, uttering the famous “mea culpa,” was when he was accused of shelving the Cyprus issue in his 1988 meeting with then Turkish premier Turgut Ozal in Davos.
The truth is that Hellenism has paid a very high price for the Byzantine politics and misunderstandings between Athens and Nicosia. There was a lack of sincerity in what, for example, Archbishop Makarios wanted and what the Greek governments wanted in the 1960s. Many political games were played and many attempts to tow one side toward the other. The leading manifestation of all these problems was certainly the fate of the Acheson Plan, which could have solved the Cyprus issue on terms extremely beneficial to Greek interests.
What’s done is done, some will say, and rightly so. But it is important to learn and study the history of this major national issue without sentimentality and fictional narratives.
But the danger today is to consolidate the division imposed by the Turkish invasion in 1974. The international community has many open fronts and is not concerned with Cyprus. International adherents of cynical realism claim that “the problem was solved in 1974.” A large part of the Cypriot people is tired and not interested in the issue. A generation and a half has grown up without ever having lived with Turkish Cypriots and does not want to take the risk of an uncertain cohabitation. The pragmatic solution of the “velvet divorce” no longer ensures tangible benefits for the Greek-Cypriot side because Turkey is not ready to return significant percentages of territory.
Therefore, the window of opportunity for reaching a solution that would also survive a Greek-Cypriot referendum is narrowing. The time of hard and final decisions has probably arrived. Let’s hope that Athens and Nicosia will keep a united front. All the signs indicate that this is the intention of Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. After all, they have both read enough history to know how self-destructive an intra-Greek blame game can be.
