Monday, February 21, 2022

Dangerous double standards - KATHIMERINI

21.02.2022 • 21:30

Advocating for justice for Cyprus in Washington, DC requires levels of commitment and stamina that most people do not appreciate. Listening to administration after administration loudly declare commitments to human rights and international law while reducing such commitments to whispers with regard to Cyprus is maddening. Trying to decipher why the US State Department uses the word “occupation” around the world while studiously avoiding it when talking about Cyprus makes us feel for the scholars who were trying to understand hieroglyphics prior to the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Tragically, we often feel that State Department and National Security officials speak to us (and to the Republic of Cyprus) as if they are engaged in their own version of the Melian Dialogue: “The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must.”

This frustration reached a new level this month. On February 1, Cypriot Foreign Minister Ioannis Kasoulides met with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. They discussed bilateral relations, regional cooperation (including fixing the mess caused by the famous EastMed “non-paper”), and new confidence building measures on Cyprus. The day before, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield admonished the Russians at the United Nations Security Council with this statement: “Imagine how uncomfortable you would be if you had 100,000 troops sitting on your border.”

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Turkey's Kurds & Cyprus' tCypriots

As either unitary state or federation solutions are discussed as replacements to Cyprus' 1960 and Turkey's 1923 unworkable constitutions, should we abide by "if a right is a right too many for Turkey's Kurdish community (circa 23% of population) then that right is a right too many for Cyprus' tCypriot community too (circa 15%), and vice versa." Is the adoption of this fair logic the catalyst to securing just solutions for both UN countries.