Will Cyprus stay in perpetual division?

With EU-Turkey relations at an all-time low, the reunification of Cyprus seems like a distant prospect. This week I saw an island where the frozen conflict has become largely normalized. Unlike in Berlin, this wall doesn't look like its falling any time soon.

Sometimes, old wounds just won't heal. So it is with the island of Cyprus, where a 180 kilometer scar runs from shore to shore, and has been festering for four decades.

I visited the island for the first time this week, and those wounds were on display right from the start. As my plane flew across Greek Cyprus, over the capital Nicosia, I could see the giant Turkish flag painted on the mountains to the north, taunting the Greeks. It reminded me of the Alexanderplatz TV Tower in Berlin, built to be unavoidably visible everywhere in West Berlin during the Cold War.

The trip was, admittedly, somewhat of a box-checking exercise. Of the 32 European Union and EFTA countries, there are three left that I haven't visited - Cyprus, Slovenia and Romania. I'm heading to Slovenia next month for a conference, and have resolved to do a weekend in Bucharest before the year is done. Then - I win?

A Cyprus whodunit

Brussels is in full blame-game mode today following last night’s rejection by the Cypriot parliament of the bailout package offered to the country by the EU. It’s a veritable whodunit mystery, with the answer depending on whether you’re inclined to believe the President of Cyprus, or the rest of Europe.

All sides agree on one thing – the decision taken by European finance ministers in the early hours of Saturday morning to require a one-time levy on all Cypriot bank accounts in exchange for the bail-out was colossally stupid, plunging the Eurozone into a new crisis and risking a bank run in the country. What cannot be agreed upon is whose idea it was.

Raiding people’s savings accounts is an unprecedented move. Such conditions were not imposed on any other country receiving bailout money, and indeed no such idea was ever even discussed. But Cyprus is a special case. As the likelihood of an EU bailout for the small Mediterranean island increased, worry began growing that the move would actually be a bail-out for wealthy Russian oligarchs who use the island for money-laundering or tax-evading.

In Cypriot hands

When Cyprus was admitted to the European Union in 2004, it was hoped that membership would help unify the divided island into a single state once again. But in an ironic twist of fate, the EU itself may be divided while it is under the leadership of Cyprus over the next six months.

On 1 July Cyprus will take over the rotating 6-month presidency of the European Union from Denmark. It is almost the perfect storm of fragility – the union is set to be led by one of its weakest members at a time when its own weakness threatens to tear it apart.

The Greek Cypriot government, which is the one that will be taking over the presidency, rules over just 800,000 people - fewer than live in the EU’s ‘capital city’ Brussels. This of course excludes the 300,000 Turkish-speaking people in Northern Cyprus, a self-governing break-away territory that has been separate since the country’s civil war in 1974. But as the EU does not recognise the existence of Northern Cyprus, nominally the entire island is taking over the presidency.

Turkey, whose military still occupies Northern Cyprus, is the only country that recognises it as a country. The Greek Cypriot government considers itself to be the ruler of the whole island, as does the EU. But they are effectively two separate countries in an open state of war, but with a cease-fire.