The so-called Green Line on the island of Cyprus is the southern
limit of what Turkish Cypriots call the Turkish Republic of North
Cyprus, and what Greek Cypriots call the “Turkish Republic of North
Cyprus.” That’s the northern third of island, which the Turkish
army “occupied” (or “liberated”) in 1974. Subsequent population
transfers have left the south almost purely Greek and the north
almost purely Turkish.
One of the first people I met last Sunday, after crossing the
Green Line headed north, was a fellow whose accent, sports clothes
and SUV marked him as a middle-class Englishman on vacation. The
only anomalous detail was his complexion, darker than usual for the
natives of that other green and pleasant island. He was a Londoner
of Turkish Cypriot origin, which shouldn’t have surprised me, as
many Cypriots and their children live in that city of
immigrants.
What was remarkable was what he was doing: waiting for a friend
to cross over, so that the two could spend the day together at the
beach. The friend was a neighbor from London, a Greek Cypriot who
was spending his vacation in the south, and enjoying the rare
privilege of admission to the north (where even people with
Greek-sounding surnames are regularly turned away).
The two friends had flown from the same city to the same island
but had landed in different airports and were now having to go
through the inconvenience of a border crossing (or as Greek
Cypriots would say, a “border crossing”) just to see each other.
All because of the supposedly implacable hatreds dividing their two
communities.
The next day, leaders of those communities met in the Hague with
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the aspiring architect
of their reconciliation. That meeting was a failure, and it now
looks as if Cyprus will not be reunified anytime soon. Yet thinking
of the two friends from London encourages me to think that
reunification will happen, and that it will happen under the
auspices of another international organization.
Most Americans take the European Union even less seriously than
they do the U.N., but that’s not realistic. The E.U. is a U.N. with
teeth. Its 15 member states recognize the Union’s laws and
regulations as superseding their own, and 12 of those states have
handed over their power to print money to the European Central
Bank. These numbers will soon rise with the accession of 10 new
member states.
One of the members-to-be is the Republic of Cyprus, which
governs the south while claiming sovereignty over the entire island
— sovereignty recognized by all foreign nations save Turkey.
Cyprus has been guaranteed a place in the E.U. next year even if it
fails to end partition.
Young Turkish Cypriots, who face dim job prospects in their
isolated and underdeveloped country, are desperate to rejoin the
Republic and thus enter the E.U. Greek Cypriots, who have less
incentive to reach a quick resolution, and are accordingly more
ambivalent, also want to join the E.U., not least as protection
from the Turkish army troops on their island. Cypriots of both
communities think of themselves as Europeans and want to be
recognized as such. However long it takes them to forge a civic
identity under which Greek and Turk can live together simply as
Cypriots, that identity is bound to be European — as it is already
for those two men from London.
The E.U. has far greater economic, legal and military clout than
the U.N., and it enjoys a special psychological edge when it comes
to Cyprus. The U.N. has been there for 40 years, since the first
post-independence inter-ethnic strife. No doubt its blue-bereted
soldiers (now mostly British and Argentinean, and at one time
Canadian) have prevented much violence, but the sheer length of
their stint inevitably links them to decades of failure, especially
the partition they could do nothing to stop. Whereas the E.U.
represents the future.
If the E.U. can broker the island’s reunification and a lasting
peace, it will earn the sort of international respect mere euros
can’t buy. Foreign policy experts will flock to Brussels to find
out how the narrow-minded Eurocrats, infamous for their concern
with questions like the proper standard for tomato sauce viscosity,
managed to reconcile Muslims and Christians in a post-9/11 world.
And Turkish Cypriots will once again have a passport they can
actually travel on.
