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Lessons from Cyprus

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

Well, Cyprus has just pulled away from its erstwhile, north European shadow. And perhaps shown the way too.
Under a deal brokered by the United Nations, the divided parts of Cyprus, Greek and Turkish, are to reunite in advance of the island’s joining the European Union on May 1. The accession was to go ahead anyway for the Greek part of the island.
Now, the Turkish Cypriot government has evidently decided that economic advance trumps ages-old national and religious enmity and will agree to reunification in order to secure an equal share of EU membership.
Oh that the same pragmatism was evident in Northern Ireland.
The comparisons between Ireland and Cyprus tend to crop up with ease. Cyprus was formerly ruled by the British, who still maintain military forces in so-called “sovereign” bases, one on the Greek side of the cease-fire line, the other on the Turkish side.
Turkish and Greek Cypriots adopted a power-sharing constitution when the island became independent from Britain in 1960, but the agreement faltered, fighting erupted, and the eventual result of this was a partition of the island in the 1970s.
Unlike Northern Ireland, however, outside military intervention in the name of peacekeeping came not from Britain but from the United Nations. The UN has been involved in the effort to bring about normalcy since 1964 and much of the UN’s work since that time has been carried out by Irish peacekeeping troops and diplomats seconded to the world body.
Those who take a more pessimistic view of the seemingly intractable impasse in the North peace process will likely see parallels with post-independence Cyprus.
There are also clear differences of course, one of them being the role of the UN in Cyprus and its absence in Ireland. There were moves, and plenty of calls, for UN intervention in the North when the Troubles erupted in the late 1960s. But the certain British Security Council veto over such a move ensured that the North would remain an “internal” British concern.
Given the latest breakthrough on an island in a warm sea, who would not now be tempted, if there was a chance, to do a little historical rewriting for an island in a colder one.

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