Sotiris Paroutis, who made a programme about the rotating presidency (good for him!), asked Niyazi Kizilyurek about the insecurity Greek Cypriots feel. When the president is a Turkish Cypriot, whose interests will he serve: Cyprus’s or Turkey’s? If, say, it suits Cyprus to send its natural gas to Egypt rather than Turkey, will the Turkish Cypriot president go along with it?
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.
