Abstract
By the end of his tenure as the UN Secretary-General, Waldheim would have taken little solace from Matthew 5:9 (“blessed are the peacemakers”) as far as the Cyprus conflict was concerned. Having described the Cyprus problem as one of the most complicated and emotionally loaded problem he came across,1 Waldheim accredited the prevailing status quo as the main bulwark preventing a solution to this problem. In particular, commenting on the subjective nature of the negotiations, Waldheim stated that “the existing status quo [tended] to create a dynamic of its own, which [did] not necessarily facilitate an agreed solution.” He identified two sets of difficulties for this predicament. The first concerned the positions of the two communities during the negotiations. The other related to the political problems “they faced in tackling the compromises and accommodations” essential to achieving progress toward a negotiated solution.2By the 1980s it became evident that the impasse at the intercommunal talks was primarily because a psychology of complacency had set in on all parties. This was reflected in the undisciplined mood of the negotiations and punctuated by lack of movement on the major issues. With the passage of time, the negotiations became retrospective as they revoked previous commitments and became more susceptible to an ad hoc combination of external and internal factors.
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Notes
Kurt Waldheim, Building the Future Order: The Search for Peace in an Interdependent World (New York: Free Press, 1980), 42.
Spyros Kyprianou, “Letter to Secretary-General of the United Nations,” New York, December 13, 1984.
Mario Mindiano, “Reagan’s Letter Generates Cyprus Breakthrough,” Sunday Times, December 16, 1984.
Information about an airport at the outskirts of the village Lefkoniko being constructed and financed by the United States was first revealed by the news article “Cyprus Tension Rises over US ‘Base Plan,’” Sunday Times, May 27, 1984. This was followed by Christopher Hitchens’s, “Minority Report: Cyprus,” Nation, August 18–25, 1984, 104. In their editorial on the proximity talks, The Times mentioned the airport by linking it to the U.S. Central Command (“More Discreet Proximity on Cyprus,” November 27, 1984, 15). These reports prompted a denial by Richard N. Haass, “US Views on Cyprus,” The Times, December 20, 1984, 11.
Glen D. Camp, “Cyprus Between the Powers: 1980–1989,” The Cyprus Review 1, 2 (1989): 74, believed that reports of the Lefkoniko airport were part of a disinformation campaign that originated with a forged letter published on the front page of the Greek Cypriot newspaper Simerini on November 26, 1985.
Richard N. Haass, Conflicts Unending: The United States and Regional Disputes (New Haven: Yale UP, 1990), 71–2.
Interview by Pérez de Cuéllar, BBC Four Radio (January 24, 1985).
AKEL Central Committee, “1985 Parliamentary Results,” Neos Dimokratis 89, 1986, 7–10.
Christos Ioannides, In Turkey’s Image: The Transformation of Occupied Cyprus into a Turkish Province (New Rochelle, NY: A. D. Caratzas, 1991), 163–5.
Turkey Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy of Turkey at the United Nations, vol. 3 (Ankara, 1983), 502.
UKHouse of Commons, Foreign Affairs Committee, Report on Cyprus (London: HMSO, May 1987), xvii.
Demographist Aaron Segal, An Atlas of International Migration (London, 1993), 162, estimated that there had been 80,000 Turkish settlers by the 1990s, while Özgür stated that 50,000 settlers were officially imported into northern Cyprus between 1974 and 1986, Humanité, April 7, 1984. The most accurate figure, however, was provided by Yenidüzen, February 15, 1989, which revealed that 46,216 Turkish nationals settled in the TRNC in 1974–1986. It is worth noting that even Denktash admitted that 45,000–50,000 Turkish nationals had migrated to the TRNC, El Pais, July 20, 1988.
Spyros Kyprianou, “Letter to His Excellency Mr. Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Secretary-General of the United Nations,” Nicosia, March 10, 1987.
Richard N. Haass, “Cyprus: Moving Beyond Solution?” The Washington Quarterly 10, 2 (1987): 188–9.
Greek PIO, Greece: Background, News, Information 27, London, February 25, 1988. It appeared that foreign exploitation of Greek-Turkish differences was a widely held view amongst many left-wing political leaders in both Greece and Turkey. For example, Ecevit asserted that after “World War II, when other countries were too occupied with their own problems and left Turkey and Greece alone, excellent relations and co-operation between the two countries were established in the 1950s, and were only disrupted as a result of the events in Cyprus. So the elimination of outside influences is essential for a solution of the problems between Turkey and Greece and for a solution of the Cyprus problem.”.
Bulent Ecevit, “Turkey’s Security Policies,” in Greece and Turkey: Adversity in Alliance, ed. J. Alford, (Adelphi Library 12, 1984), 141.
Greek PIO, Greece: Background, News, Information 31, June 30, 1988.
Mehmet Ali Birand, “Turkey and the ‘Davos Process’: Experience and Prospects,” in The Greek-Turkish Conflict in the 1990s: Domestic and External Influences, ed. D. Constas (London: Macmillan, 1991), 27–9.
Theodore Stanger, “A Town Moves out of Town; Too much Tourism for the People of St. Napa,” Newsweek 113/1, March 13, 1989, 39.
Leonard W. Doob, “Cypriot Patriotism and Nationalism,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 30, 2 (1986): 383–96.
According to the World Bank, in 1978 Cyprus’s GNP per capita was $2,120, whilst Turkey’s was $1,200 and Greece’s $3,250, all ranked as middle-income countries, World Development Report 1980 (Washington, DC, August), 111 and 159. In 1989, Cyprus’s GNP per capita raised to $7,040, which, according to the World Bank, ranked as a high-income economy, surpassing Greece at $5,350 and Turkey at $1,370, World Bank, World Development Report 1991: The Challenge of Development (New York: Oxford UP), 205 and 271. Independent Turkish Cypriot figures for this period are hard to find, as they were not registered by international financial monitors. This account is attributed to David Barchard, Financial Times, December 3, 1985, in Demetrios Christodoulou, Inside the Cyprus Miracle: The Labours of an Embattled Mini-Economy (Minnesota Mediterranean and East European Monographs 2, 1992), xiv–xivi.
See Paschalis M. Kitromilides, “The Dialectic of Intolerance: Ideological Dimensions of Ethnic Conflict,” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 6, 4 (1979): 5–30.
Caesar V. Mavratsas, “The Ideological Contest between Greek-Cypriot Nationalism and Cypriotism 1974–1995: Politics, Social Memory, and Identity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 20, 4 (1997): 717–37.
Yael Navaro-Yashin, “De-ethicizing the Ethnography of Cyprus: Political and Social Conflict between Turkish Cypriots and Settlers from Turkey,” in Divided Cyprus: Modernity, History and an Island in Conflict, ed. Y. Papadakis, N. Peristianis, and G. Welz (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006), 84–99.
Niyazi Kizilyürek and Sylvaine Gautier-Kizilyürek, “The Politics of Identity in the Turkish Cypriot Community and the Language Question,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language 168 (2004): 37–54.
Christoph Ramm, “Assessing Transnational Re-negotiation in the Post-1974 Turkish Cypriot Community; ‘Cyprus Donkeys,’ ‘Black Beards’ and the ‘EU Carrot,’ “Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 6, 4 (2006): 523–42.
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© 2009 Michális Stavrou Michael
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Michael, M.S. (2009). Faltering UN Involvement. In: Resolving the Cyprus Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103382_4
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