The 1960 Treaties and the search for security in Cyprus

At the beginning of The Birds, the play written by Aristophanes, two frustrated and grizzled Athenians, Euelpides and Pithetaerus, find themselves lost in a ‘wild and desolate region’ with just a bird in each hand for company. After a while, Euelpides admits: ‘we are wandering at random, we are exerting ourselves only to return to the same spot; we’re wasting our time.’ A little later, Euelpides sighs: ‘Alas!’ To which Pithetaerus responds: ‘Aye, aye, my friend, it’s surely the road of “alases” we are following…’

The opening scene of The Birds captures the essence of the predicament which, at the time of writing in early 2009, seems to bedevil Demetris Christofias, the new President of the Republic of Cyprus and Mr Mehmet Ali Tala, the self-styled ‘President’ of the so-called ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.’ Since their widely publicized initial meeting of 21 March 2008, Messrs Christofias and Talat have been engaged in a quintessentially top-down ‘UN-backed peace process’ involving face-to-face ‘talks’ and, as of 3 September 2008, ‘fully-fledged negotiations,’ all of which have been conducted in secret.