Turkey Threatens To Annexe Northern Cyprus

by Lorys Charambolous, Tax-News.com, Nicosia

05 November 2001

Faced with the rapid progress being made by Cyprus towards EU accession as early as 2003, Bulent Ecevit, Turkish prime minister, on Sunday threatened to annexe northern Cyprus if the European Union admitted a divided island under a Greek Cypriot government which controls only the south.

"Taking southern Cyprus into the European Union means handing over (to the south) the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus," said Mr Ecevit, who was the man responsible for invading Cyprus in 1974. "In that case, a decision for annexation with the TRNC may be taken."

Currently there are no talks which hold out any real hope of a diplomatic solution to the partition of Cyprus before it is ready for accession. The EU decided at the Helsinki summit in December 1999 not to allow the lack of a settlement to prevent the accession of Cyprus, although some member states have seemed to waver from that position, notably France. The official line remains clear: "If there are no talks and no prospect for a settlement, then nobody is going to stop the admission of Cyprus," said an EU official on Sunday.

The United Nations, backed by the US and the EU, is making a fresh push to restart talks between the Turkish and Greek Cypriots. Alvaro de Soto, the UN Secretary-general's Special Adviser on Cyprus, spent the weekend in Cyprus (on both sides of the 'Green Line') and will be in Ankara today. He said yesterday he had reason to hope that progress could be made in the negotiations, but observers believe he is pessimistic about any developments.
"If I am here, it is because we have reason to hope that it is possible to make progress," he said.

Attention on the Cyprus peace effort must remain in place, de Soto said in Nicosia yesterday after a meeting with President Glafcos Clerides, stressing that work will have to continue in earnest to resume peace negotiations with a view to finding a comprehensive settlement. "This is an important issue and attention needs to remain focused on it. We have to keep our nose to the grindstone," he said. " It would not be a good thing to allow more time to pass before talks can resume again on the substance and it is necessary to begin negotiations in earnest," de Soto stressed.

A previous meeting between Clerides and de Soto, scheduled for mid September, was cancelled after the terrorist attacks of September 11. Denktash had refused to attend the meeting, which was intended to kick-start the stalled talks. Some Turkish leaders have assumed that Turkey's enhanced strategic importance after September 11 would ensure that Washington lobbied against the admittance of a divided Cyprus to the EU. Not so: "We have made it very clear to the Turks that we could not, and would not, get the Europeans to stop this," said one US official.

The objective reality is that while Turkey continues to be seen as the only impediment to a deal, or if it acts after accession by annexing the TRNC, then its own hopes of joining the EU will have been put back for a long time. But in Turkey it may be hard to be objective.

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