109 - How Solving the Cyprus Problem for Turkey Could Help Ukraine Win
Because Turkey’s autocratic leader is trying to boost Putin while simultaneously selling drone aircraft to Ukraine and assisting in moving ships full of grain, wily President Recep Tayyib Erdogan’s interests – if massaged carefully – could help produce a sustainable peace, however remote that prospect now appears.
Erdogan, ever the self-interested conspirator, has been intent in recent days to launder Putin’s proceeds from natural gas and petroleum sales through Turkish banks, to strong-arm American attempts to have Turkey join the rest of NATO in boycotting petroleum exports, and to keep talking in a friendly and manipulative manner with Putin.
Erdogan’s Turkey is also allowing the massive yachts of at least sixty Putin-aligned Russian oligarchs of various stripes and backgrounds to base themselves in southern Turkish harbors and coves despite American and European sanctions against the yacht owners. Almost everywhere else (except Dubai), nations allied with the West have seized such yachts. But Turkey knows how close many of the yacht proprietors are to Putin; indeed, some of the vessels bobbing quietly off the Turkish coast might be Putin’s.
Turkey is also welcoming about twenty air flights a day from Moscow. A reputed 8,000 Russians have purchased houses in Turkey since the Ukraine war erupted. In August alone, 128 Russian companies set up shop in Turkey.
How to bring Turkey – a large and significant member of NATO – back into the Western fold is a key problem waiting to be solved. The normal kinds of jawboning that might have worked on other authoritarians given the choice of allying with the West or joining up with Putin have so far proved unsuccessful. President Biden and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken have tried, the latter by visiting Ankara and talking sternly to his underlings, but Erdogan believes in feathering his own nest and cosying up to Putin. He also guides his nation capriciously, having refused to embrace economic orthodoxy to reduce soaring inflation (83 percent this week, although some experts think inflation has passed 186 percent) and strengthen the plummeting lira (19 lira to $1, by a recent count). Erdogan believes in his own financial genius.
Erdogan and Turkey have also long been invested in solving the fifty-year old Cyprus crisis. Cutting that Gordian-knotted circle could bring Erdogan in from the cold, and assist Ukraine’s valiant war effort.
Erdogan wants Cyprus, a member of the European Union, to admit that the Turkish-controlled northern third of the eastern Mediterranean island is in fact a separate state (nominally the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus) and not a part of Greek-speaking Cyprus that (perhaps analogous to Taiwan) was illegally removed from the control of the Greek-speaking majority in what is now, de facto, South Cyprus. The strategically situated eastern Mediterranean island as a whole is physically smaller than Connecticut.
Turkish-speaking and Greek-speaking Cypriots lived in comparative harmony under British colonial rule from 1878 to 1960, when the British government acceded to Cypriot demands to transfer sovereignty to the islanders of both dominant ethnicities. Archbishop Makarios, head of the Greek Orthodox Church in Cyprus and the leader of the local force agitating for independence, took control when the British retired.
His right-leaning administration was later attacked from the right by crypto-fascists who wanted enosis more than independence. Enosis is the absorption of Cyprus by Greece, a result sought from the 1960s by Greek-speaking fascists supported by the ruling military junta in Greece. They ousted Makarios in a putsch in 1974, breaching the careful arrangements that Britain had made as it granted independence to the inhabitants of the island. Greek-speakers massacred Turkish-speaking Cypriots in western Cyprus and forced Turkish-speakers to leave their homes in Nicosia, Famagusta, and other principal settlements.
As Turkish-speakers fled north, so Turkish armed forces moved into northern Cyprus to protect their ethnic cousins. Up to 40,000 Turkish soldiers have remained ever since to make sure that the Greek-speakers of South Cyprus do not threaten Turks in the north.
From 1964, when UN peacekeepers arrived to prevent Greek-Turkish conflict and then from 1974, when they guarded a green-line of separation between the contending ethnic establishments, north and south in Cyprus have remained estranged. In 1983, the then leader of the north unilaterally declared the existence of the Turkish Republic in Northern Cyprus. Only Turkey has ever recognized it and permitted ships and aircraft to transit to North Cyprus.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s envoy tried twenty years ago to end the political stalemate by brokering a two-state federation of Cyprus. But by that time South Cyprus was becoming a member of the European Union as the Republic of Cyprus and no South Cypriot political leader could agree to give the Turkish speakers sovereignty on a section of an island that was still legally part of a sovereign entire island Cyprus.
As the foreign minister of the de facto administration in the north said yesterday: “The root of the Cyprus issue lies in the fact that the Greek Cypriots do not see Turkish Cypriots as equal.” True, especially since there are 1,600,000 people on the south side and only 666,000 on the north. Both populations grew up as one until 1960, eat the same foods, and at one point watched the same television programs. They mingle easily in London, because of their joint heritage of the British-introduced English language, but no longer on the island itself. Tahsin Ertugruloglu, the foreign minister, also said yesterday that “the Greek Cypriots try to turn Cyprus [back] into a Greek island” – despite the continued Turkishness of at least a third of the whole.
Erdogan is obviously a fervent defender of his compatriots, especially since the discovery of oil and natural gas off the eastern coasts of Cyprus. Those finds can hardly be exploited without a settlement of the larger Cyprus conundrum.
As I wrote last week, South Cyprus also holds armaments of Soviet manufacture that could be valuable to Ukraine. But the Greek Cypriots hardly want to leave themselves defenseless so long as Erdogan has troops on the island and is playing games with Putin.
Thus there are Faustian bargains to be made by the Biden administration regarding Cyprus that - conceivably by promising robustly to protect both Cypriot sides - could bring about a peaceful resolution of the long stalemated island’s problems and thus concentrate Erdogan’s mind regarding Ukraine. Washington needs to find a way to persuade him to cold shoulder Putin; helping Erdogan to obtain what he wants in Cyprus without undermining Greek Cypriot needs could be the way forward. A fair settlement in Cyprus would also benefit both sides enduringly and, just conceivably, bring NATO’s largest military force back into action on the side of Ukraine.
Erdogan needs to be cajoled and convinced that Putin is both morally deficient, potentially a war criminal, and a bully from whom a truly self-interested Erdogan must break. Erdogan could now become Ukraine’s peace-maker rather than a peace-spoiler.