Few are more familiar with the Cyprus problem than retired British diplomat Lord David Hannay. He was a pivotal figure in the drafting of the Annan Plan, speaking daily with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s special envoy Alvaro de Soto.

He denies the view of Greek and Greek-Cypriot expert analysts that he drafted the plan.

Hannay says that the insistence of the leader of the Turkish community, Ersin Tatar, that he will enter talks only on the condition that he be recognised as the leader of the “Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”, recognised by no country except for Turkey, is an insurmountable obstacle to pushing for a settlement now, despite the recent efforts of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

Hannay defends the existence of British sovereign bases on the territory of a third country, and an EU member at that, on the basis that the Treaty of Guarantee (one of three that were the basis of  the founding of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960) remains in effect. At the same time, he avoids the question of whether the UK should pay rent for the bases.

In a wide-ranging interview, the former diplomat says that the referendum on Brexit was a very bad idea, as the result has harmed Britain economically and reduced its global influence. He notes that he strongly opposed it long before the referendum.

Lord Hannay expresses strong scepticism regarding US President Donald Trump’s plans regarding the “special relationship” between the US and the UK (which he says the UK is intent upon maintaining), as well as ties with the EU.

Finally, Hannay says he is open to the idea of an arrangement between the Trustees of the British Museum and the Greek government regarding the Parthenon Sculptures.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has commenced a new effort to restart Cyprus talks. His Personal Envoy on Cyprus, Ms. María Angela Holguín Cuéllar, submitted a final report to him in July,and the conclusion was that “after engagement with the two leaders, political actors and civil society on the island, the guarantor powers, and the broader international community, no common ground had been found between the leaders on the way forward on the Cyprus issue. Do the Cypriots on both sides really want a reunification settlement?

If we are talking about now, I am fairly sceptical about willingness to engage on the basis which all plans accept to start from. On the Turkish and Turkish-Cypriot side, they have now imposed a precondition, which is that the TRNC (“Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”, recognised only by Ankara) be recognised as a state participating in the discussions. The Greek-Cypriots, the Government of Cyprus, don’t accept that, nor does the UN, nor the Guarantor Powers, at least Greece and the UK don’t accept that. That is why the British prime minister, when he went to Cyprus recently, was not able to see the leader of the TRNC (Ersin Tatar), because he insisted on calling himself the president. In previous contacts in my time with Rauf Denktash, those contacts were based on his being the leader of the Turkish-Cypriot community. Various Turkish governments have participated in Cyprus talks without making that a precondition until fairly recently. That means that prospects of a settlement are stuck. That is what the UN Secretary General has said.

So what then do you see as the future?

I think the future is that there should be a resumption of negotiations on the basis that was laid down by the UN Security Council in innumerable resolutions. That is to say that they are participated in by the leaders of the two communities, with the object of producing a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation.

Doesn’t that sound a bit quaint these days, given the situation?

Not particularly. I don’t think UN Security Council resolutions are normally quaint and I don’t think these ones are quaint. They exist. They are a ruling by the UNSC voting unanimously. That’s how the talks should be carried on.

What do you think would make Turkey possibly take a step back?

It would depend on the degree of priority which the president of Turkey and his government gain to resuming the search for a Cyprus solution. At the moment I don’t think that this objective is very high in his order of priorities. I’m not criticising that, because  there are a lot of very, very sensitive issues facing the president of Turkey . It seems to me that Turkey has quite a few higher foreign policy priorities than Cyprus just now – such as Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine.

Cyprus

This Sept. 19, 1974, photo provided from the Cyprus’ press and informations office shows the Ledra Palace Hotel in the background during the exchange captive soldiers and civilians between Turkish and Cypriots after the 1974 Turkish invasion, in the divided capital Nicosia, Cyprus. This grand hotel still manages to hold onto a flicker of its old majesty despite the mortal shell craters and bullet holes scarring its sandstone facade. Amid war in the summer of 1974 that cleaved Cyprus along ethnic lines, United Nations peacekeepers took over the Ledra Palace Hotel and instantly turned it into an emblem of the east Mediterranean island nation’s division. (Press and informations Office, via AP)

You are said to have played a pivotal role in the drafting of the 2004 Annan Plan – as the representative of Guarantor Power Britain.

It is untrue. The plan was drafted by [UNSG special envoy] Alvaro de Soto and his legal advisor and his team. I was in very close touch with him on a daily basis. We exchanged views and I never found any fundamental disagreement with the way the UN was handling things, and my government of course supported the Annan Plan.

As did then prime minister Simitis of Greece.

Yes, indeed, and the Turkish-Cypriot side voted by a substantial majority in favour of the Annan Plan. I think they recognised that the plan was a reasonable way of moving forward with a single Cyprus, with the two parts of Cyprus having a very large amount of authority, as is often the case in federal states.

Look at the United States,where California has a lot of authority. You can have a federal state in which the central government’s powers are greater or lesser. The Annan Plan put forward a structure in which the central government’s powers were fairly modest. The powers of the two federated states were very considerable. I think that reflects the reality in Cyprus and would probably be the best place to start in a resumed negotiation.

The Greek Cypriots rejected it because, as then president Tassos Papadopoulos told his compatriots, it effectively offered Turkey suzerainty over the entire island. How do you respond to that?

It is completely untrue. That was a figment of his imagination. All I can say is that the reasons he gave his electorate in voting down the Annan Plan were based on certain statements that were not true.

Did then Greek PM Costas Karamanlis’ tacit consent to Papadopoulos view help attain the overwhelming rejection of the plan?

Not probably very much, because it was a permanent feature that, after the miscalculations made by the [Greek] military dictatorship when they overthrew President Makarios, that the position of the Greek government was always a position of subordinacy in the formulation of policy. It was for the Cyprus government  to make  that policy. That’s what happened when the vote was taken on the Annan Plan, and so Greece didn’t really intervene very much at that stage. 

 

The two British sovereign bases on Cyprus are of critical geostrategic importance to both the UK and the US vis a vis the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Yet, how can one justify in the 21st century that a third country has sovereignty over the territory of an independent state, and an EU member at that? At the very least should the UK not pay rent for keeping these bases?

It is based on the fact that it is enshrined in international law, set out in treaties between Cyprus, the UK, Turkey and Greece. Those treaties are all in the archives of the United Nations. They are the basis upon which Cyprus became independent.

Yes, but the world is very different today than it was in 1960.

Yes, of course, but treaties are treaties.

But would it not be fair for Britain to pay rent for those bases?

I’m not going to get into that. The British are very closely in touch with the government of Cyprus about the handling of all sorts of issues that arise as a result of the sovereign base areas. It is not British practice as reaffirmed recently in the context of the Chagos Islands to reveal what the costs of the base areas are. UK sovereign base areas cost money because they are military bases, and the practice of any economic activity is not allowed. That’s to prevent the British turning them into economic powerhouses, and also to ensure that neither the Turkish-Cypriots nor the Greek-Cypriots do the same. This is in the Treaty of Guarantee.

If ever in the future talks resume, do you think that a very loose confederation that would be a thinly veiled two-state solution might be a prospect Turkey would entertain?

I don’t think calling it another name, ie a confederation, is going to get anybody anywhere. It’s been tried several times. Rauf Denktash tried it. It is not acceptable to the Greek-Cypriots, and without them you don’t have a deal. It is not acceptable to the Greeks either. But if you are asking me are there different variants of a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation, which give more or less power to the central or federal government, or to the two federated governments, then there is a huge scope there for flexibility. One can move in one direction or in the other. You would have to have all parties agreeing to it which would be the basis of a settlement. But as the Annan Plan showed, you can construct a federal bi-zonal, bi-communal federal state which has much weaker powers at the centre and gives much stronger power to the federated states. That is the case in the present Constitution Of Cyprus.

Do you think it conceivable that an exceedingly revisionist Turkey in an increasingly revisionist world might annex the occupied north?

I don’t know. I’m not responsible for formulating the policy of the government of Turkey. But successive Turkish governments over many decades have never shown any inclination whatsoever to go down that road. I think it would isolate them from the United Nations Security Council and the large majority of countries in the world who recognise the Republic of Cyprus. So I don’t think it’s a very viable approach, but that is a matter for the government of Turkey. 

As a British diplomat, how do you view the impact of Mr. Trump’s isolationism both on US-EU relations – and the so-called US-UK “special relationship”?

President Trump has made a number of statements, many of which are not entirely clear in their implications, either regarding the timing or the status we will enjoy, as United States policy. Britain has this very strong relationship with the United States that goes back a long, long way and was a crucial feature of two World Wars, and we don’t intend to give that up. The government has made that clear and I would support that.

But the new policies that President Trump has begun to talk about contain a number of extremely complex and possibly rather disruptive elements so far as the development of that relationship is concerned. We’ll have to handle those in the way that close allies handle them, which is to say talking to each other rather than talking to the press all the time. That’s what will happen, as it will with other Europeans.

I think the British government over the years has been quite right to urge all European members of NATO to have stronger defence arrangements to deter the sort of aggression which President Putin unleashed on Ukraine, and I think they will continue to do that. Alas, their performance, as opposed to their language, has been less clear-cut, because British defence spending dropped but is now above two percent. The general view across parties in the UK is that it will have to rise if the deterrent effect of NATO is to be reinforced.

You played a role in negotiating Britain’s accession to the EU. In retrospect, was Mr. Cameron’s Brexit referendum a mistake, and how has Brexit since benefited or harmed Britain economically and politically?

Former PM David Cameron’s decision to have a referendum was quite clearly a mistake. I gave that answer innumerable times in things that I wrote and said in the House of Lords, long before the referendum took place. I have always thought that subjecting a very, very complex set of arrangements, which is what membership in the EU is, to a referendum is not a wise thing to do. I thought that in the 1970’s when we had a referendum and two-thirds of the British people voted to remain and one-third to leave. I thought that was a mistake then, but we had it and it produced a result that unfortunately the people who wanted us to leave did not accept, so we had a second one in 2016. I still thought that was a mistake.

I would be hard pressed to recognise any positive consequences [of BREXIT]. I notice that the supporters of leaving the EU have fallen remarkably silent in recent months, because they find difficulty in identifying any advantages, for which they blame their own leaders and the chaos and the fact that there were no plans for the day after the referendum. The consequences have tended to be pretty negative. They have reduced our prosperity. They have reduced our influence in the world, and they’re not a good story to tell. But the new government that came in after the July election has set as its target to negotiate a new defense pact with the members of the European Union.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer will be going to a meeting on 3 February with the 27 members of the EU to discuss those security aspects. He’s spoken of a reset of Britain’s post-BREXIT relationship. He’s not trying to overturn the result of the referendum. That’s wise not to do that, even if one might wish it to happen. He has identified a number of issues such as veterinary testing, acceptance of industrial standards, and Northern Ireland. He wants to improve on that, because he thinks, and I believe he was right, that the Trade and Cooperation Agreement which was negotiated by the Boris Johnson government was thin and defective.

Do you support the return of the Parthenon Sculptures to Greece?

I support anything that the British Museum and the Greek government can agree to, whether that be a kind of sharing arrangement by which the sculptures return to Athens for certain periods and then come back to the British Museum for other periods. There probably are hundreds of different variants of that. Anything that the British Museum and the government of Greece can agree on and implement honourably and loyally would have my support. I don’t see this British government standing in its way.