It was announced this week that genuinely committed talks on the reunification of Cyprus would come into effect in September of this year.
Demetris Christofias, the Greek Cypriot president, met with the Turkish Cypriot president Mehmet Ali Talat on the 28th of August, and both are reportedly keen to discuss a potential reunion of the island. It is the fourth time Talat and Christofias have met to discuss union issues since the latter came to power, signaling a potentially serious reconstitution of what it will mean for citizens on the island to call themselves Cypriot.
With discussions now proposed, it is important to remember that the ‘Cyprus Dispute’ is a substantial historical division. Certainly, The Republic of Cyprus now claims possession and influence over 97 of the island’s land split into Turkish Cyprus and Greek Cyprus and Britain maintains control over the remaining portion, but this was the outcome of numerous conflicts.
Long before the division, though, and indeed long before the U.K held any claims, Cyprus had been under the colonial possession of the Ottoman Empire, of which Turkey was the centre. At that time it was a united island, though it had a strong ethnic mix; the Ottoman Muslims cohabited with the Christian Greeks.
It was only during the late nineteenth century that Turkey suffered any challenge to its domination in Cyprus, and this is generally attributed to the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire, which saw many of Europe’s Great Powers competing for the empire’s border territories. The most famous of these conflicts, the Crimean War, saw the Ottoman Empire supported by an alliance of Great Britain, France and Sardinia against the territorial ambitions of Russia, who were at that time viewed by many European diplomats and heads of state as the most dangerous threat to the continent’s status quo.
But when it came to Cyprus, it was Great Britain who looked to shift the balance of power on the Ottoman Empire’s borders, though it was cloaked within a commitment from the U.K to once again protect the balance of power against Russian expansion. Administrative power over the island was given to Great Britain in 1878.
After the Ottoman Empire allied with the defeated powers in World War One, it was decided that Cyprus be annexed as part of post war negotiations. 11 years later, Cyprus became an official colony of the British Empire.
Under the British Empire, and fueled with Woodrow Wilson’s post war implementation of self determinism, Greek Cypriots established the ‘National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters’ in 1955. Turkish Cypriots countered with the ‘Turkish Resistance Organisation’, and both groups sort for independence on their own terms.
Independence was indeed granted in 1960, with both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots maintaining constitutional rights, and the island became ‘The Republic of Cyprus’.
From there, a number of flash points occurred. In the 1970s, a Greek coup funded by the United states attempted to unite Cyprus with Greece. turkey invaded Cyprus in order to ratify the original constitution, and a civil war raged. Its consequence was the partitioning of Cyprus into Turkish and Greek sections.
That is the position in which the island currently stands today. If Christofias and Talat are to succeed in reunification talks, they will have to be aware that they have the weight of history on their shoulders.
Author Resource:-
Chris Woolfrey specialises in the history and politics of Cyprus, and writes for http://www.whiterocksbafra.com
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