Man of Straw

By William Mallinson

It is perhaps typical that the only person whom the pro-Turkish government brigade could wheel out for yet another partitionist tirade on Cyprus should be a pseudo-left winger, the discredited politician Jack Straw, who lied his way through the Iraq enquiry, was involved in extraordinary renditions and torture, and later in a shady political lobbying affair, boasting to two undercover journalists that he ‘operated under the radar’, and had used his influence to change EU rules on behalf of a firm which paid him £60,000 a year.

Given that the Turkish government uses various PR and lobbying companies, one is inclined to wonder why he has been wheeled out to write an article in The Independent (1 October) calling for partition in Cyprus. Is he being paid? And does it mean yet another desperate attempt to foist on the people of Cyprus another pseudo-solution, which would consign the island to a NATO-controlled pro-Turkish semi-state?

Straw pleads for partition and recognition of the Turkish Cypriots as a state, which would finally represent the victory of brute force over international law (although he does not dare to say this), claiming that only this will bring the dispute between Turkish and Greek Cypriots to an end. To support this argument, he claims that every attempt to come to a solution has been thwarted by the Greek Cypriots. In fact, the opposite is the case, as a reading of the Foreign Office files show. Indeed, a senior FCO official wrote that the Greeks wanted a legal settlement, the Turks a political one. For ‘political’, we can read ‘outside the law’. Straw thus shows both his bias and his ignorance. Perhaps he should read the following FCO post-invasion (1975) quotes:

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