Strategic Assessment

While there are conflicts perceived to be much more difficult to resolve, it is the conflict in Cyprus that has earned the label “the diplomats’ graveyard.” Still, there is a growing recognition that the ostensible status quo will not prevail much longer and that the island might drift into a permanent partition. The last major effort to resolve the conflict was the plan proposed by then-secretary-general of the United Nations Kofi Annan, which was formulated between 2002 and 2004 but failed to attain the support of Greek Cypriots. To this day, four years after the failure of the Annan plan and the membership of only the Greek part of the island in the European Union, the sides have yet to return to the negotiating table. A contributing factor in the Greek Cypriot side has been the presidency of Tassos Papadopoulos, the person considered to have been a key factor in the refusal of Greek Cypriots to vote for the Annan plan in the binding referendum that was held in April 2004. Thus for example in a televised speech before the referendum, he wept when he asked Greek Cypriots not to vote for the plan. Since the failed referendum, Papadopoulos has claimed that without significant change in the plan, it is pointless to revisit it, but he has refused to specify what precisely needs changing. At the same time, it is not only Papadopoulos’s rule that has contributed to the stalemate, but also the fact that the international community was taken by surprise by the Greek Cypriots’ refusal to approve the referendum and was at a loss as to how to deal with that development. Thus in recent years, after a long period in which the international community viewed the Turkish side as responsible for preventing a solution to the Cypriot problem, the tables have turned somewhat, so that now it is precisely the Greek side that is deemed the obstacle to progress towards a solution. Nowadays much depends on developments following the 2008 presidential elections in the Republic of Cyprus.