Queen’s Speech

Lord Sharkey Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sharkey]

My Lords, I will speak about the current situation in Cyprus. The reunification process is now 40 years-old. During that time, important changes have taken place on the island, but not any settlement. In particular, civil society has matured, and matured faster than the political systems. The economic gap between the north and the south has grown considerably and now there is the important fact of the discovery of large natural gas reserves in Cypriot territorial waters. But the reunification process itself is, at best, stalled.

Alexander Downer, the special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General, said in Cyprus two weeks ago:

“It is clear to me … that the negotiations have recently come to something of a standstill”,

and,

“I explained to both Leaders that there could be no more business as usual”.

He also said:

“The Secretary-General has told the sides that it is never too late for bold and decisive moves and new ideas or innovative proposals. But if none are taken, then obviously there will be no further convergence on core issues”.

The questions that arise from all that are: why has the negotiating process failed and what can be done to give it a prospect of success, so that it is not simply a rerun of what has been tried many times before?

It is entirely possible that negotiations have failed because of a lack of political will to succeed on both sides. In fact, a reasonable interpretation of the current position might well be that both political sides are essentially quite happy with the current arrangements. Perhaps, too, the negotiations have failed because they have been essentially political. There has been no wider involvement of the citizens of the island or, indeed, of its business communities. That is a great pity, because 70% of the island’s inhabitants, both north and south, want the negotiations to succeed, but only 15%, north and south, believe that they will succeed in their current form.

The stalemate over reunification is more dangerous now than it has ever been. Three new factors make it so. First, the economic conditions of the north and south continue to diverge in a way that will progressively make reunification less attractive to the south. Secondly, the recent gas finds in Cypriot territorial waters are already a real cause of tension between the communities and their supporters. Thirdly, the whole region is significantly more troubled than it has been for many years.

All this argues for some urgent, fresh initiatives, some fresh approach, before the situation descends into partition, open conflict over gas finds or, paradoxically, the unnecessary impoverishment of the island because of the impossibility of exploiting the gas reserves in a politically unstable area of contested territory. But what forms might new initiatives take?

On Tuesday evening, I attended a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues on this very question. The meeting was full of members of both diasporas and was called to listen to organisations of civil society from both the north and the south. The speakers, both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, offered this perspective. They were certain that the people of Cyprus wanted reunification. They were equally certain that the people of Cyprus felt excluded from the negotiating process. They were absolutely confident that the current negotiating model, which they characterised as “two old men in a room with United Nations”, would continue to fail. They told us that that model was understandable enough 40 years ago, but that civil society had matured, was stronger now and needed to play a role. They told us that negotiations should not proceed in the search for a master settlement where nothing was agreed until everything was agreed. They made the case for a progressive, gradualist, continuous series of small, positive changes. They told us of the existence of cross-community civil society groups, bi-communal activities and projects. They saw the extension of those efforts as a new way forward, a practical way of aligning the citizens of the two communities and a way of building the trust and familiarity that the political parties had so obviously failed to build. They wanted our help, as a guarantor power, and the continued help of the EU and the UN, in doing that. They wanted our help in strengthening those civil society projects and in giving them a standing and legitimacy that their own political establishments had been reluctant to concede.

Those representatives of Cypriot civil society seemed to me to make a compelling case. That well-known Californian novelist, Rita Mae Brown, once remarked that a good definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something different to happen. This must not be the case with Cyprus. I ask my noble friend the Minister to give careful consideration to these proposals for a new approach to negotiation.