Opinion
I’ll admit it: I can’t quite share the excitement over Tufan Erhürman’s rise to leadership among the Turkish Cypriots. Maybe it’s because I don’t think we’re at five minutes to midnight; we passed midnight long ago. To be precise, it’s been eight years since July 7, 2017, when António Guterres wished the Cypriots north and south “good luck.”
That was the day Nicos Anastasiades, heartbroken over the collapse of the talks, flew home, slipped into his striped Ralph Lauren polo, and headed off to his daughter’s Cuban-themed birthday party to drown his sorrows in whiskey and Havana cigars.
Now, I should clarify: my disillusionment isn’t limited to “our” politicians, meaning the Greek Cypriot side, whose intentions regarding a solution have been, let’s say, less than pure for decades. But neither do I romanticize the Turkish Cypriot leaders. Some were better than others, sure, but let’s not rewrite history. Memory is a stubborn thing, and it doesn’t carry a large basket for wishful thinking.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not naturally pessimistic. Heaven forbid! And I fully understand the impatience on our side, the yearning to hear, as if it were the Resurrection Gospel itself, that Ankara and the Turkish Cypriots are abandoning their “two-state” nonsense and returning to the shared vision of a bizonal, bicommunal federation with political equality, as defined by the UN Security Council.
Of course, that announcement would send waves of joy through the Greek Cypriot side. Especially among those who’ve spent these last years in public mourning...genuine and dramatic...over Turkey’s refusal to resume talks and its departure from the “agreed framework.”
And I can even imagine the quiet sense of triumph that President Christodoulides would feel, having spent every ounce of his energy, since his first day in office, pursuing that elusive goal: the resumption of talks from where they left off in Crans-Montana, on the agreed basis.
Let’s not forget, though, who else would feel vindicated...albeit many years late: Nicos Anastasiades himself. The once-mocked “Neneκος,” who might now appear prophetic if Erdogan were to suddenly change course.
After all, back in 2005, fresh from a visit to Ankara, he said, “The feeling we’ve come away with is that the Turkish side is willing to contribute to solving the Cyprus problem. The message the Turkish Prime Minister sends to Greek Cypriots is that he truly wants a solution as soon as possible. His view that ‘no solution is not a solution’ seems sincere, and he wants the talks to resume.”
And yet... the skeleton remains in the suitcase. And sooner or later, we’ll have to do something with it.
Let me remind you: Guterres himself said that “by the end of the conference, the sides had practically reached full agreement on the federal executive authority and effective participation.”
Christodoulides, then Foreign Minister, repeatedly said we were “minutes away from a solution.” Former Greek FM Kotzias even recalled, “On Thursday night we went to dinner feeling satisfied; we thought we had achieved everything we wanted.”
Those “achievements” were the abolition of guarantees and intervention rights, the very issues from which Mevlut Cavusoglu later backtracked, causing the talks to collapse. Had he not, we would have had a deal.
But what did we do after that? With remarkable zeal, we demonized every single element of the solution, every convergence, every compromise, everything we had already “fully agreed on.”
So if we’re now planning to “return to where we left off,” with the skeleton still packed neatly in that suitcase, I have to ask: what exactly are we going to do with it?
*This op-ed was translated from its Greek original.
