Kosova expects, Cyprus chooses…

An eventful weekend in prospect. Cyprus votes on Sunday in a presidential election and it seems likely that Kosova will declare independence Sunday or Monday. I’ve covered Kosova before, and am due to give a press conference on Tuesday in Strasbourg giving my reaction to things when they happen. The latest news is that yesterday a small bomb went off in Mitrovice near the EU office there, happily nobody was hurt. Increasing tension was partly dealt with by a press conference from the Prime Minister yesterday where he assured the minority populations about the commitment of his government and all parties to human rights, but there remain a lot of anxious people out there, with good reason.

Meanwhile, the most geographically opposite country in the EU to Scotland, Cyprus, is having an election which will have a decisive, direct, immediate impact upon our relations with Turkey, future NATO co-operation and the rule of law in the EU. You have of course not heard of it in the domestic media, because all the EU’s political reporters are watching the glitzy razzmatazz stateside. Grr.

Cyprus has been divided since 1974, a year after I was born (though in fairness that is of little significance), when the Turkish army invaded the north of the island, ostensibly to protect the Turkish community who were under threat from the Greek Cypriot coup. The international community has refused to recognise the legality of either the occupation or the administration in the North and an uneasy partition was allowed to take place.

Greek Cyprus acceded to the EU in 2004 along with the host of other EU member states, acceded to the eurozone at Hogmanay this year, and is a fully fledged member of the EU, albeit with half their island under foreign occupation. So the Greeks in Cyprus now find themselves in a position to stymie, effectively forever, Turkish attempts to join the EU, because not unreasonably they want to see a resolution of the Cyprus question before they will even entertain the idea of talks. The latest reunification proposals were put forward by the UN in 2004, and pretty decisively rejected by the Greek Cypriots, under the leadership of the current President Tassos Papadopoulos. The grounds for this rejection essentially being that the plans legitimised an illegal occupation by making concessions to the Turkish side.

So this election is important for the peace process. The latest polls give Papadopoulos, communist challenger Demetris Christofias and right-winger Ioannis Kassoulides virtually equal chances, possibly leading to a run-off on February 24, so we watch with interest. Diplomats are going to try again to restart talks, but in the absence of a change of political leadership in Greek Cyprus it seems unlikely that any positions will have changed much.