DIPLOMACY : No Light at Tunnel’s End for the ‘Cyprus Problem’

What they have here on Cyprus is a negotiator’s nightmare, a recurring torment not unlike that of the legendary Greek King Sisyphus, who was condemned to roll a stone up a hill and, eternally, have it roll back down as he neared the top.

It happened last in September. After months of work by United Nations diplomats, and a high-level boost from the White House, a breakthrough seemed possible in the political impasse that has physically divided Cyprus between its Greek and Turkish communities since 1974 and culturally split them decades longer. But, near the top of the hill, progress stopped.

It may be happening again, despite statements of bold optimism from President Bush and U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on a new round of negotiations. They would not be the first to misread the political chasm here. The “Cyprus problem” is among the hoariest in diplomacy. In a two-year span that has seen the Berlin Wall and Beirut’s barricades fall, Cyprus and Nicosia, its capital, remain armed and divided.

Leaders of the two halves, Cypriot President George Vassiliou and his Turkish counterpart, Rauf Denktash, head of a self-proclaimed breakaway republic on the north of this eastern Mediterranean island, were in New York this week, meeting separately with Boutros-Ghali. There was a tone of exasperation on both sides.

“I think that the Cyprus problem is a relic of the past,” Vassiliou, leader of the island’s 540,000 Greek Cypriots, told reporters in New York. “In today’s world there is no basis . . . to continue with a so-called confrontation.”

The parting words of Denktash as he left U.N. headquarters: “Either the Security Council or the U.S.A. should tell the Greek Cypriots that their sovereignty does not cover the Turkish Cypriots. You (the Vassiliou regime) are not the government of (the 125,000) Turkish Cypriots, nor could you be.”

Into this strained atmosphere Boutros-Ghali is dispatching U.N. negotiators to once again try to find some common ground that could restore the island under a single government.

“I have not used the word optimism, “ Nelson Ledsky, President Bush’s trouble-shooter on Cyprus, said here earlier this month in describing prospects for getting the talks cranked up again.

“(But) my frame of mind is that a good piece of work was done . . . trying to put together material which might go into a draft framework agreement. I believe this material we have before us can be completed.”

But things have changed since last September, when Greek Prime Minister Constantine Mitsotakis and his Turkish counterpart, Mesut Vilmaz, representing the patron nations of divided Cyprus, admitted that promising negotiations had broken down.

The return of old-time pol Suleiman Demirel as prime minister of Turkey is expected to harden Ankara’s position. Demirel’s foreign minister, Hikmet Cetin, visited Denktash’s Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in early January and remarked that “the winds of change” in the world demand a national identity for people once part of multicultural states--including the Turkish Cypriots.

On the Greek Cypriot side, the old-time religion of enmity is preached by Archbishop Chrysostomos, politically powerful leader of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus, who said after talks with U.S. envoy Ledsky: “Unless Turkey withdraws its troops and settlers from here and allows the (Greek) refugees to return (to the occupied north), there will be no peace in Cyprus.”