Troublesome neighbours: Some fences take a lot of mending

Some fences take a lot of mending

THE first hurdle to be surmounted on Turkey's journey to Europe may well be Cyprus. Greece and Turkey have growled at each other over Cyprus ever since the Turkish army invaded the tiny island in 1974 to pre-empt a coup aimed at enosis (union) with Greece. That led to a division of the island, which replaced inter-communal strife with physical separation. For the Turkish speakers in the northern part of the island, acknowledged only by Turkey, it also meant economic stagnation.

Only some nifty semantics in Brussels last December managed to stop the Greek-speaking part of the Mediterranean island (which at that point had been a member of the EU for all of six months) from using its veto to spoil Turkey's European ambitions. In the end, Mr Erdogan agreed to recognise Greek-speaking Cyprus as a member of the EU without recognising the state itself. All the same, Turkey will shortly have to revise its 1963 association agreement with the community, in which it recognised the existing members at the time, to extend that recognition to all the new members that have joined since, including Cyprus.

When Mr Erdogan returned from Brussels with his carefully worded agreement, the opposition in parliament homed in on the fate of the northern part of the island. Mr Baykal, leader of the Republican People's Party (the only parliamentary opposition), told Mr Erdogan: “If you sacrifice Cyprus, the nation will sacrifice you.”

But Mr Baykal's reading of the nation's mood may be less astute than Mr Erdogan's. The prime minister has no doubt noticed the parallel with Britain, where voters in the 1990s were getting tired of the running sore in Northern Ireland. Once Ireland and Britain were both members of the EU and the large economic gap between them began to close, the issues that divided the communities in Northern Ireland started to fade.

In the 19th century, when the British used Cyprus to stand guard at the entrance to the Suez Canal, the island had considerable strategic importance, but now it is little more than a few orange groves and a string of sunbeds. Turkey will be hoping that over the next few months the UN's so-called Annan peace plan for reuniting the island can somehow be revived. When both halves of the island voted on it in 2004, it received overwhelming support in the north, traditionally seen as the main obstacle to settlement, but surprisingly was vetoed in the south. Next month the northern region may swing further in favour of such a plan when it votes for a new president to replace the long-time holder of the post, Rauf Denktash. At times Mr Denktash has seemed almost pathologically opposed to reconnecting the two halves of the island.

Nothing could establish Turkey's political maturity more surely in the months to come than an ability to extricate itself from Cyprus without feeling diminished. It is uncomfortable about handing over the Turkish-speaking community in the north to a country led by Tassos Papadopoulos, a man described in the Turkish press as a “terrorist turned Greek-Cypriot leader”. But now that the island is a member of the EU, it has to accord its minorities the same sort of protection that the EU is asking Turkey to provide.

The only party with real clout is the EU itself. Mr Erdogan is thought to have decided not to stand in the way of any internationally led peace initiative on the island, an example perhaps of his pledge to “jettison the past”. Some Turks would like Britain or Germany to threaten to recognise northern Cyprus if the Greek-speaking Cypriots do not come into line. But that is unrealistic. The best hope for a settlement lies in the EU finding a way to make Mr Papadopoulos see the sense of a new sort of enosis, one with the ostracised northern part of the island.

Iraq's dominoes

The other place high on Turkey's foreign agenda is Iraq. Although the Turks opposed the Americans going in, and stopped the troops from passing through en route to the north of Iraq, the war has been of great economic benefit to them. Plastic containers for Turkish drinking water are strewn all over Baghdad, and Turkey has served as a market garden for the foreign troops there.

Turkey, however, is watching developments in the northern, Kurdish part of the country with trepidation. It claims to be keeping a brotherly eye on the Turkomen minority there, central Asians with some DNA in common with some Turks. But why should it feel more concerned about Turkomen interests in Iraq than about the interests of its own Kurdish minority inside Turkey?

The deeper fear is that the Americans will not be able to hold the three very different parts of Iraq together - the Kurds in the north, the Sunni Muslims in the middle and the Shiites in the south. Turks are worried that the Kurds will break away from a fragile federation and form their own country (the dreaded Kurdistan), centred on the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

They believe that the Kurds in Turkey would then want to annex a big chunk of their land to this new state. The movement of thousands of ethnic Kurds into Kirkuk just before the Iraqi elections at the end of January this year prompted a senior Turkish general to give warning that they could “cause a serious security problem for Turkey”. Mr Gul, the foreign minister, expressed similar concerns to the UN.

The Kurds claimed that they were simply responding to earlier population shifts engineered by Saddam Hussein, who forced large numbers of Iraqis to move from the south of the country to wealthy Kirkuk to dilute the Kurdish majority there. The two long-serving leaders of the Iraqi Kurds, Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, say that the Kurds' national aspirations can be met within a federal system.

Other Kurds continue to argue that the unity of Iraq is not sacred, especially if the rest of the country to their south falls further into chaos. Should they gain the upper hand, it is not inconceivable that the Turkish army might want to move into northern Iraq. For many Turks, there is a Jerusalem quality to Kirkuk. It is a place they believe should always have been theirs.

Article is part of an Economist survey on Turkey and considers the country's relations with Cyprus.

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