His exact words: “If, God forbid, the weekend brings nothing but doom, gloom and deadlock, and not a leaf stirs, Averof will be a candidate.” But he said that on 23 September, and it was never going to hold for ever. Not a leaf stirred then. Now the leaves can whirl into a tornado for all the difference it makes. The decision has been made.

The real story is how our party gatekeepers have managed, a year and a half before the presidential election, to get everyone obsessing about it. There is some movement now, and it could lead somewhere (could, mind you), yet everyone is still glued to the presidential race. We should be fixed on the Cyprus problem and where it might go, alert enough to grab whatever opportunity comes along or to brace for whatever danger. Instead, our first thought is: what will Averof do? That is how thoroughly the party bosses have got us hooked.

Has anyone noticed that in public debate the Cyprus problem has been reduced to a parenthesis? Quite literally. They mumble half a sentence (the usual hot air about how “we must not miss the opportunity” and “the Cyprus problem is our priority”, that sort of thing), then it’s straight back to the juicy stuff: the likely candidates, the backroom manoeuvring, the alliances in the making. Even the President, who is handling the Cyprus problem and insists it is far too early to talk about the presidential election and that he has not decided whether to run in 2028, is churning out announcements at an ever faster clip. He hasn’t launched an election campaign as a candidate. He has launched a campaign (not an election campaign, naturally?) as President.

The two big parties, meanwhile, have thrown themselves into the race, even if neither has officially fired the starting gun: DISY with its internal elections and everything before them that rattled its faithful, AKEL with its hunt for an “electable candidate” who will be legally watertight against Christodoulides. And against Anastasiades too, no doubt.

Now there is talk of a package of confidence-building measures to be agreed, which means opening crossing points. Who is going to look at that without weighing it on the electoral scales? Take Kokkina. The Greek Cypriot side wanted a crossing there, so that the people of Tillyria could at long last have a way through after sixty-odd years of isolation. Then, out of nowhere, the package offers a Kambos-Karavostasi crossing instead. By what logic this is meant to stand in for the Kokkina demand is anyone’s guess. Where exactly would anyone set out from to reach Karavostasi by way of Kambos? Nowhere.

But who cares? Perhaps Averof, who hails from those parts, could explain it to us? Then again, if movement is an end in itself, however pointless, no explanation is needed. It’s all inexplicable anyway.

PS. The old Cypriot saying “another one for Karavostasi” fell out of use after the invasion, because Karavostasi, near Xeros (pictured: the jetty), now lies in the occupied north. I asked AI what it meant and it came out with some barmy stuff. It is “used figuratively”, it told me, “to suggest that someone has lost their mind, is behaving madly or bizarrely, or that a situation has spun completely out of control into utter chaos” (…) “It is the Cypriot equivalent of the mainland Greek ‘We’re all off to Dafni!’ or ‘Lock us all up!’” Can that be right? Not a chance.

Kizilyurek’s answer struck us. The president and vice-president (or whatever we end up calling the pair who take turns at the top) would be elected on a single ticket, he said, by the people as a whole. So they would share a common programme. Neither would be free to do as he pleased.

This is the most airbrushed version of the issue you could hope to hear. And it is deeply flawed, because it rests on wishful thinking, not on facts and realities. So let’s talk facts. The most workable ticket of that kind would be one put together by AKEL and the Republican Turkish Party of Tufan Erhurman and Mehmet Ali Talat. They would have every chance of being the first to govern the new Cyprus, and of running the country for years and years.

After all, they got on very well for many years, even before the crossings opened. Yet when Talat took over the ‘presidency’ in the occupied north and Demetris Christofias was in charge in the Republic of Cyprus, what we remember is Christofias calling him “comrade Talat”, and Talat asking him to please stop calling him comrade.

And when Erhurman took over in turn, he cooled things with AKEL. He would not even pick up the phone when they rang to congratulate him. Meanwhile, as everyone knows, once Talat and Erhurman took charge of the negotiations, their positions were indistinguishable from Turkey’s. Will that change after a settlement? Perhaps. Far more likely, it won’t. We can see where they stand. It hardly takes much analysis to work it out.

All this talk of a joint ticket is theoretical, of course, because in reality no such provision exists anywhere, and nobody is even proposing it (apart from Kizilyurek). If the Turkish side’s demand rested on that kind of arrangement, a rotating president elected on a single ticket, with a common programme and by the votes of the whole people, then there might be a chance of a genuinely united Cyprus, even in that form, even if it took a long time.

Because that could create the conditions to bring the country and its people together. It would force Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot parties to work together and, in some ideal, distant future, perhaps even to merge.

But that is not what the Turkish side’s demand is about. Quite the opposite. It is about cementing the racial segregation of the citizens, the land and the state. And doing it in such a way that they can never grow together as Cypriots who want what is best for the country they share. Hence the insistence on “one positive vote” (a veto, in plain English) in cabinet decisions on every single issue, not just those that concern and affect each community.

Besides, the single ticket for electing a president and vice-president who would rotate in office was a Greek Cypriot proposal. Nicos Anastasiades tabled it at Crans-Montana, too, as a joint ticket that would also include cross-voting and weighted voting. The Turkish side rejected it. Or does Kizilyurek know something we don’t? Has Erhurman accepted it while the rest of us weren’t looking?

Let’s not take whatever fantasy pops into our heads and dress it up as fact. That is taking the public for fools.

Agree with him or not, I say this for a reason. Ever since Averof Neofytou’s strategy (manoeuvring, as plenty of people call it) forced DISY’s official leadership to withdraw party leader Annita Demetriou’s candidacy for the presidential election and, in the end, to beg Neofytou to stand in the internal race, I had been wondering whether anyone in the party still had the dignity to call things by their name. Georgiades did. A little late, perhaps, but he did. And ever since, we have watched a procession of people, none of them as battle-scarred in party politics as he is, line up to scold him in the name of party unity.

Suppose Georgiades had swallowed his objections and then spent the campaign hiding so he would not have to back his own party’s candidate, all to hang on to his post as chairman of the Glafcos Clerides Institute. That would have been hypocritical and undignified, and it would have wounded his party very badly. Invited onto television debates and to rallies, as he inevitably would be, he would have had to dream up excuse after excuse for not turning up. That alone would have done the party and its candidate far more harm.

So he chose to speak now, 16 months before the election. “On grounds of principle”, he said, he could never accept “a fait accompli which I believe was shaped under conditions of pressure and blatant political blackmail”. As he wrote in his letter to Demetriou, he believes decisions of this kind should have been preceded by “a sober political process, through which the party’s strategy would be drawn up and its options assessed”. Instead, he charges, “tactical game-playing, backroom manoeuvring and unbridled ambition prevailed”.

When he talks of blackmail and games, he means this: Neofytou kept the threat of an independent candidacy dangling “until the last moment”, and with it the prospect of a serious split in the party. Who missed that? Who failed to see the blackmail for what it was? Whether or not Neofytou went down that road because he was taken for a ride at a fish tavern, the fact remains that the whole party swallowed the blackmail, held its tongue and gave the games free rein. That is not the stature of the country’s largest party.

Once Georgiades saw his colleagues pretending they had seen nothing, heard nothing and understood nothing of what the whole of Cyprus had seen, there was only one thing left for him to do: protect his own political dignity.

Now he is being given lessons in party etiquette, with deputy leader Yiannis Karousos first in the queue. The gist is that Georgiades should have swallowed the blackmail like everyone else and backed whoever the members choose. What really bothers them, I suspect, is this: his stand exposes everyone who kept quiet.

That is play-acting, not politics. It is the same play-acting we saw in 2023, between the first and second rounds, when the party officially declared a conscience vote and then canvassed its own members for AKEL’s candidate.

They have been hunting for the mistake ever since. They still have not grasped that beyond personal agendas, vendettas, obsessions and inconsistency, there is such a thing as political dignity, credibility, principle and, yes, a “sober political process”. That is what should be driving their politics.

“The problem with the rotating presidency is not just that security and guarantees remain unresolved. I believe it goes much deeper. It entrenches the racial basis of the settlement. It means a significant section of the population will be forced, undemocratically, to accept a president it did not vote for. And because the settlers are not leaving (that is no longer even up for discussion), that president will in all likelihood be a settler. Settlers outnumber indigenous Turkish Cypriots several times over. Those are simply the odds.

“Then there is the fact that the 2:1 ratio does not reflect the lawful population ratio anyway. And, finally, the President has accepted such an arrangement, albeit conditionally, without telling the public and without its approval. Let nobody claim this was Anastasiades’s concession. Since no agreement was reached, the President can renegotiate whatever he likes. Instead, he is reaffirming it by insisting that the convergences be put on record.”

I agree with all of that. Over the years I have made plenty of other arguments that the rotating presidency is anything but a sensible, honest, fair or democratic arrangement for a normal state, which is what Cyprus must be after a settlement. What I have been trying to say in recent days, as Erhurman keeps making acceptance of the rotating presidency a precondition for restarting negotiations, is this: as part of a dialogue, we would discuss even that, if it meant Turkey disappearing from Cyprus.

It is absurd to expect us to swallow it up front, as a show of goodwill to the Turkish Cypriots, when they will not even discuss the withdrawal of the Turkish occupation army or the abolition of Turkish guarantees. So we owe them a clear answer. If there is no chance of them agreeing to build a normal, independent state free of occupation troops and Turkish control, there is no chance of us even discussing a rotating presidency.

Our problem is that even within the Greek Cypriot political leadership, there is a belief that we will never be rid of Turkey and never build a truly united Cyprus, yet will still share the running of the country with the Turkish Cypriots, the settlers, and the Turkish ambassador or whichever Turkish vice-president runs the Cyprus file for Ankara.

Societies mature through democratic principles and human values. They do not mature because an occupation army or an apartheid regime forces them to. Turkish Cypriot politicians, Erhurman among them, keep telling us they cannot conceive of a Turkish Cypriot never being able to become president.

Well, nor can we conceive of anyone being installed as president by force of Turkish arms. That is what happens in coups that install dictatorships. It is the surest route to a fresh ordeal. As I have argued here before, this recipe entrenches racial segregation and blows apart the principles of democracy, and of federation too.

In a system built on democracy, nothing can stop the people from electing a Turkish Cypriot. It may take years before a Turkish Cypriot polls beyond his own community. But only when Greek Cypriots vote for him will our ordeal be over and the foundations laid for a democratic state of Cypriots. As long as we, Greek and Turkish Cypriots alike, allow Turkey to dictate the terms of an occupier, we will never reach the maturity of other countries.

Look at the rest of the world, with its democratically elected presidents and mayors, and even its appointed ministers. They should be the best examples to give us all the answers we are looking for to our concerns.

They hunt for any excuse to hurl abuse and vent their spleen at those who said “no” in 2004, without once stopping to think that they are talking about the majority of the people. Our No, they write, has nothing in common with Ioannis Metaxas’s. We said No to the reunification of our homeland and to the withdrawal of the occupation army, they claim, whereas Metaxas said No to the conqueror.

Even at this distance in time, they cannot bring themselves to accept that we said No in 2004 for exactly the same reason the Greek people said No in 1940. For freedom and dignity. Not to become serfs in our own land. Not to swallow the conqueror’s ultimatum, however prettily garnished.

So, on this anniversary, to those who insist on churning out the drivel that we supposedly said No to the reunification of our country, we say it once more, in the hope that it finally sinks in:

We will say YES when our survival in our own land is guaranteed. When we are no longer asked to put up with some misshapen power structure that turns its back on Europe’s democratic achievements and values. When we are no longer asked to become the generation that uprooted the Greek presence from this island after 3,000 years, a presence that had outlasted dozens of conquerors. We will say YES when the occupier leaves our land and lets the people of Cyprus live free and independent, in a democracy that meets the standards of modern political life, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Charter.

Metaxas’s No was the only option, they say. So was ours. And it still is. If the choice is whether to say “yes” to the Turkification of our homeland, they shouldn’t hold their breath. And they had better stop reminding us of the germanotsoliades. They had better stop reminding us of the Security Battalions that helped the German occupiers in Greece.

Xenofon Giosmas, one of the best known of them, declared at his trial over his part in the murder of Grigoris Lambrakis: “And if I collaborated with the Germans, I did it for the good of the fatherland.” In the well-known Greek war film ‘Dawn of Victory’, screenwriter Giorgos Lazaridis captures the germanotsoliades in one pinpoint line, putting these words in the mouth of the traitor and Nazi collaborator: “The Germans love us. They came as our friends.”

We are at exactly the same point today. They are few, but they are out there, the people who say: “The Turks love us. They came as our friends.” And just as many say: “And if I collaborated with the Turks, I did it for the good of the fatherland.”

They are no different from the germanotsoliades. They pretend not to understand that the Turks are here as conquerors, and that anyone who collaborates with them, anyone who wants to talk us into accepting them as friends, is a Security Battalions collaborator, nothing less. A germanotsolias. One who wants everyone else to keep quiet so that he can air his feelings for the occupiers unchallenged.

If today’s anniversary recalls anything of the glory of that historic No, the No of 1940 and the No of 2004, it is freedom, justice and dignity. We will say it again if we have to. NO, we will not stay silent in the face of plans to enslave us. We will not legitimise the occupation. We will not accept a new apartheid in our homeland. We will not tear out half our heart and bury it in Kyrenia. However many years go by, we will not write off freedom, independence, democracy and dignity. The invader’s ultimatums will only ever strike a chord with the germanotsoliades and their kind. They too are a chapter in our history. And history will judge them.

“The resumption of negotiations depends on the two sides.”

“The final decision depends on the two sides.”

“The prospect of a solution to the Cyprus problem depends on the Cypriots themselves.”

“The decision to move the process forward rests with the leaders and, above all, with the Cypriots themselves.”

Every answer, every angle, the same refrain. Perhaps it’s Colombia’s civil war talking: guerrillas holding 30 to 40 per cent of the country on one side, government forces on the other, 60 years of fighting, thousands dead. Or perhaps it’s the “conflict resolution” theories we have been choking on for half a century. Theories and hot air!

Here’s the thing. In the Cyprus dispute, no mediator gets anywhere by shoving the single most important part of the equation in a drawer and pinning the outcome on “the Cypriots themselves”. In the entire interview, Turkey came up in exactly one question. She was asked what she wanted from Ankara to get talks restarted. And once again, her answer airbrushed Turkey out of the picture. She said she was in touch with the three guarantor powers, then made very sure to repeat: “However, the final decision rests with the Cypriot leaders and the Cypriots themselves.”

How exactly is Holguín, or any other mediator, supposed to help broker a settlement when they write the heart of the problem out of the script, or simply refuse to get it? They talk as though this were a domestic squabble between two communities. A religious feud, even. An internal conflict that broke out because, say, two tribal warlords split the population and declared a revolution, one Christian, one Muslim. Each rallied his own faithful, each carved out his fiefdom facing the other’s, and now along comes Holguín to help them lay down their arms so they can live happily ever after, and the rest of us happier still.

Is she not listening? Even to open the road between Athienou and Aglandjia, and to agree the confidence-building measure on crossing points she so badly wants, she is told the army won’t allow it. Which army? The Turkish army. The occupying army. Do the other guarantors have occupation armies of their own, policing the ceasefire line and deciding which crossings open?

Or are the other guarantors also planning an undersea pipeline from Turkey to occupied Kyrenia, to pipe gas in (and, mostly, pipe it out)? On Monday, a fresh Turkish NAVTEX went out for seabed surveys by four Turkish ships off Cyprus, as groundwork for that very pipeline. Or do the other guarantors keep military drone bases on the island too?

So, enough of the hot air. Perhaps Holguín would care to explain exactly how the prospect of a solution depends on the Cypriots themselves? Is there any way the Cypriots can decide on a solution, or even on restarting talks, without Ankara’s say-so? It’s not enough that, despite their role, they stomach 40,000 occupation troops and everything Turkey does to Cyprus. They have to make fools of us as well!

The announcement came from then Transport Minister Alexis Vafeades, the man who would step up to take the bullet. The government, he said, was moving immediately to hand the entire upgrade project over to the Cyprus Ports Authority: port, marina and land-side area.

The mayor, the president of the Larnaca District Local Government Organisation and the president of the Larnaca Chamber of Commerce and Industry were more than satisfied. “Decisions have been taken, and at long last a project the town has been waiting on for decades and decades is on its way to becoming reality. It’s a day of joy for us. We are waiting to see our project delivered,” said the chamber’s president.

After the ordeal they had been through with the private company that took the project on and then left in disgrace, after the town’s protests and promises that came to nothing, they had every reason to believe that “decisions have been taken” at last. Until yesterday, that is. Because yesterday another problem cropped up, one that the Presidential Palace and the ministry should have known about when they were taking those decisions.

Yesterday, then, an opinion from the Law Office of the Republic turned up at the House Transport Committee. It said that the marina and its land-side area are state property and that developing them requires a public tender. (The land matters, by the way: that is where the grand buildings will go up, the ones that will earn the contractor a fat profit.) So if the Ports Authority wants to take on the development, it has to enter the tender when it is announced and put in a bid. It cannot take over the project by direct transfer.

In other words, the state, which owns the land, cannot find a way to transfer it to the Ports Authority, which the state also owns. Nor can the state’s own Law Office find a way. It hands down an edict to the letter of the law and leaves everyone else running in circles. But we are talking about political decisions here. Whether a project this important is taken on by the state, by one of the state’s own authorities, or handed to a private investor from China, Qatar or Norway is a political decision. The Law Office cannot make that decision. The President of the Republic and his Council of Ministers have a duty to make it, just as they made the decision to terminate the project contract with Kition.

Granted, there would be a legal problem if the state decided to hand the project directly to a private company without any bids. But that it cannot find a way to give the project to one of its own authorities, a state body at that, strikes us as bizarre and baffling.

Unless, of course, they were looking for a way to bring private investors into the project, rather than a way to hand it lawfully and methodically to the Ports Authority. Because, let’s be blunt, the whole project, as Kition Ocean Holdings had taken it on until it was thrown out in May 2024, was worth 1.2 billion euros. We’re talking serious money!

On April Fool’s Day 2022, the Cypriot state handed a private company, Kition, the keys to the port and marina of Larnaca (which are also points of entry into the country, so this is no joke) to make the biggest investment ever! We all know what happened next. Now they tell us they cannot hand the keys to the most obvious state body for the job, the Ports Authority, because they are letting legal hair-splitting paralyse necessary and urgent political decisions. Well, no serious state behaves like this.

It provides for the fenced-off area of Varosha to be handed over to United Nations administration, followed by the return of its lawful inhabitants. At the same time, Famagusta port would operate under the supervision of the European Commission. The idea has now been reworked and tabled by President Christodoulides. Tufan Erhurman has rejected it.

But the talks will only get unstuck, and a favourable climate will only take shape, through substantial, game-changing ideas like this one. Not because yet another crossing point opens, or because the two leaders turn up together to swap kisses at a festival in Pyla.

Erhurman rejected it because, he says, it isn’t balanced. “Why is this being made the price for handing Varosha over to UN administration?” Because, as he explained yesterday, “Famagusta port is open. Famagusta port is not closed. The problem with our ports is that we cannot trade directly with the European Union.”

But could the port really be placed under European Commission supervision and still not trade directly with the EU? The answer is obvious. The one taking the risk here is Nikos Christodoulides, because this way he opens the door to direct trade. Besides, he could simply demand that Varosha be handed over to the UN without offering anything in return, as Security Council resolutions have demanded ever since 1984.

Resolution 550 called for “the transfer of this area to the administration of the United Nations” and condemned as inadmissible “attempts to settle any part of Varosha by people other than its inhabitants”. Resolution 789, in 1992, urged that “with a view to the implementation of resolution 550 (1984), the area at present under the control of the United Nations Peace-keeping Force in Cyprus be extended to include Varosha”.

So yes, Christodoulides’s proposal really isn’t balanced, because Varosha should be handed to the UN with nothing in return. Christodoulides even offers something in return, and Erhurman still isn’t happy. All he wants is for direct trade with the European Union to be legitimised. Full stop. Because the Turkish side’s demands are reasonable and fair, while the Greek Cypriot side’s are unreasonable and unfair.

Meanwhile, the road to a solution will apparently open if the Mia Milia crossing opens, or if the two leaders stroll together along Ledra Street, or if they visit together “one site in the north and one in the south, alternately or simultaneously”, as he told the newspaper Politis in an interview on Sunday. He said he had suggested this to Christodoulides, who replied that he “prefers such visits to take place after full negotiations have begun”.

After all these years and all that village-fête diplomacy, especially under Christofias and Talat, and Anastasiades and Akinci, are we really going to do it all over again? So that another half-century can drift by in search of trust and a favourable climate, circling back every so often to the same old opportunistic confidence-building measures just to kill time? Right now, only game-changing decisions of substance can deliver any result. Provided, of course, there are leaders willing to take them.

P.S. The Varosha and port proposal “is not new”, Erhurman said yesterday. It was put forward in 2006 and Mehmet Ali Talat rejected it, so Erhurman rejects it too. (Turkey rejected it, actually, but let that pass.) So it’s an old proposal. What of it? Does that mean it can never be tabled again? Yet the rotating presidency, also an old proposal, can be tabled, and even set as a precondition to justify running down the clock? That is called duplicity, not sincerity or political will. Let’s call a spade a spade.

What is anyone with a shred of common sense supposed to make of that? That the Turkish demands on both executive power and effective participation had been met. Those are core issues for the Turkish Cypriot side. Add to that something everybody knows: the Greek Cypriot side, or at least its leaders, have also accepted a rotating presidency. Demetris Christofias did. Nicos Anastasiades did. And before them Glafcos Clerides, ensnared by Hannay and de Soto (a whole other saga!). So it is not something the Greek Cypriot side rules out.

So what is the point of Tufan Erhurman now making it a precondition? And a precondition not for the start of substantive negotiations, mind you, but merely for the five-party conference that might lead to negotiations.

He said it again on Sunday, telling Politis that “the Greek Cypriot side has not yet responded to any of the points of my methodology”. “The issue of the rotating presidency,” he said, “is one of its main pillars. So far I have not heard the Greek Cypriot leader say: ‘I accept, in principle, the rotating presidency.’” He wants it, he says, “accepted at this point in time”. Accept it as a matter of principle now, and then they will negotiate the arrangements that would apply under a rotating presidency.

Fine. Let’s say the rotating presidency is a matter of principle, not substance. But isn’t the withdrawal of Turkish troops a matter of principle too? Nikos Christodoulides ought to answer in kind and ask Erhurman to accept troop withdrawal as a matter of principle, then negotiate the substance: the arrangements and timetables for the pull-out. And what about scrapping the guarantees? Implementing the UN resolutions on handing Varosha over to UN administration? The departure of the settlers? The return of the occupied territory? If Christodoulides demanded that Erhurman accept these as matters of principle before talks begin, that would at least make some sense. Because back in 2017, the UN Secretary-General himself found that the two sides had practically reached full agreement on exactly what the Turkish side wants on executive power and effective participation. So what is left? The withdrawal of the troops and the liberation of Cyprus.

When Erhurman and the Turkish Cypriot hardliners declare, time and again, that the Turkish guarantees, the right of unilateral intervention and the presence of the Turkish army are red lines, and that they will not even allow them onto the negotiating table, what are the Greek Cypriots meant to do? Forget all that, and accept the rotating presidency as a matter of principle, up front, no less?

If Christodoulides tells him he accepts the rotating presidency in principle, can Erhurman say that he, too, accepts in principle that Turkish troops will leave and the guarantees will go? Because suppose Christodoulides hands Erhurman what he wants without so much as a negotiation, only for us to be told at the end, just as we were at Crans-Montana, that Turkey’s withdrawal and the creation of a proper state are a midsummer night’s dream. Then what on earth are we going to negotiate?

According to the Turkish newspaper ‘Turkiye’, the patrol boat ‘TCG Karatas’ is taking part in Operation ‘Mediterranean Shield’, showing the flag in the area.

That’s half the picture. The other half will be filled in on Saturday by Christodoulides and Erhurman, who will turn up together at the bicommunal peace festival in Pyla.

That was the fruit of their latest meeting on Tuesday, or rather of a whole string of meetings. And no doubt the festival will have a lovely atmosphere. Unless, of course, somebody changes Erhurman’s mind for him. Because we have seen this film before. In 2019, Anastasiades and Akinci were due to attend a bicommunal football match in Pyla together, between Nea Salamina, the refugee club of Famagusta, and the Turkish Cypriot side Magusa, which carries the Turkish name for Famagusta. So Anastasiades went. The UN officials went too, all smiles. Akinci never showed up. Because, he said, he would not get equal treatment.

Anyway. Christodoulides and Erhurman also agreed to take part jointly in forthcoming meetings of the Technical Committee on Cultural Heritage, the Technical Committee on Youth and the Coordinating Committee of the Civil Society Consultative Body. But the festival, an entertainment event with food, drink, music and fun on the futsal pitches in Pyla, is perfectly colour-coordinated with the message of Operation ‘Mediterranean Shield’.

Turkish warships and survey ships circle Cyprus, getting ready to lay a pipeline tying Turkey to the island. Meanwhile, the leaders of Cyprus’s two communities put on a show of fake friendship (frenemies might be nearer the mark) at a fun-filled festival perched on a fragile balance of terror. In Pyla, of all places. With food, drink and music.

Fine, let’s say this sort of thing is needed to improve the climate. Never mind that it has been tried for years on end. But when months of effort to get negotiations restarted produce a joint appearance at a festival in Pyla, it is hard to believe we are heading in the right direction. We are heading in the direction Ankara dictates.

It gets worse. When President Christodoulides was asked whether the agreed joint appearances, such as the Pyla festival, were purely symbolic, he replied: “No, absolutely not, under any circumstances.”

That is the danger, and sadly it is also the reality. They are not symbolic. They are substantive. And it all comes down to the Turkish side’s relentless, unbroken exploitation of even social, sporting and cultural events to entrench the division ever more deeply, along with the conditions for two peoples, two religions and two statelets to live side by side. All in the name of creating a favourable climate, which is also what Guterres’s envoy is after. She is due on the island at some point this month, and has said she will keep encouraging both sides to create the favourable environment required.

Christofias and Talat built themselves a lovely “favourable environment”. So did Anastasiades and Akinci. Then they got down to brass tacks and discovered, along with the UN mediators, that they had forgotten (or pretended to forget) that Turkey was in the room too, standing between them. Year after year, the same saga plays on in endless reruns. The cast changes. The script never does. So why on earth would the ending be any different?